NAME
alsactl - advanced controls for ALSA soundcard driver
SYNOPSIS
alsactl [options] [store|restore|init] <card # or id or device>
DESCRIPTION
alsactl is used to control advanced settings for the ALSA soundcard
drivers. It supports multiple soundcards. If your card has features
that you can’t seem to control from a mixer application, you have come
to the right place.
COMMANDS
store saves the current driver state for the selected soundcard to the
configuration file.
restore loads driver state for the selected soundcard from the
configuration file. If restoring fails (eventually partly), the init
action is called.
init tries to initialize all devices to a default state. If device is
not known, error code 99 is returned.
If no soundcards are specified, setup for all cards will be saved or
loaded.
OPTIONS
-h, --help
Help: show available flags and commands.
-d, --debug
Use debug mode: a bit more verbose.
-v, --version
Print alsactl version number.
-f, --file
Select the configuration file to use. The default is
/var/lib/alsa/asound.state.
-F, --force
Used with restore command. Try to restore the matching control
elements as much as possible. This option is set as default
now.
-g, --ignore
Used with store and restore commands. Do not show ’No soundcards
found’ and do not set an error exit code when soundcards are not
installed.
-P, --pedantic
Used with restore command. Don’t restore mismatching control
elements. This option was the old default behavior.
-I, --no-init-fallback
Don’t initialize cards if restore fails. Since version 1.0.18,
alsactl tries to initialize the card with the restore operation
as default. But this can cause incompatibility with the older
version. The caller may expect that the state won’t be touched
if no state file exists. This option takes the restore behavior
back to the older version by suppressing the initialization.
-r, --runstate
Save restore and init state to this file. The file will contain
only errors. Errors are appended with the soundcard id to the
end of file.
-R, --remove
Remove runstate file at first.
-E, --env #=#
Set environment variable (useful for init action or you may
override ALSA_CONFIG_PATH to read different or optimized
configuration - may be useful for "boot" scripts).
-i, --initfile #=#
The configuration file for init. By default,
PREFIX/share/alsa/init/00main is used.
FILES
/var/lib/alsa/asound.state (or whatever file you specify with the -f
flag) is used to store current settings for your soundcards. The
settings include all the usual soundcard mixer settings. More
importantly, alsactl is capable of controlling other card-specific
features that mixer apps usually don’t know about.
The configuration file is generated automatically by running alsactl
store. Editing the configuration file by hand may be necessary for some
soundcard features (e.g. enabling/disabling automatic mic gain, digital
output, joystick/game ports, some future MIDI routing options, etc).
SEE ALSO
amixer(1), alsamixer(1), aplay(1)
BUGS
None known.
AUTHOR
alsactl is by Jaroslav Kysela <perex@perex.cz> and Abramo Bagnara
<abramo@alsa-project.org>. This document is by Paul Winkler
<zarmzarm@erols.com>.
15 May 2001