.TH ALSACTL 1 "07 May 2014"

.SH NAME

alsactl \- advanced controls for ALSA soundcard driver

.SH SYNOPSIS

\fBalsactl\fP [\fIoptions\fP] [\fIstore\fP|\fIrestore\fP|\fIinit\fP] <card # or id or device>

\fBalsactl\fP \fImonitor\fP <card # or id>

.SH DESCRIPTION

\fBalsactl\fP 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.

.SH COMMANDS

\fIstore\fP saves the current driver state for the selected soundcard

to the configuration file.

\fIrestore\fP loads driver state for the selected soundcard from the

configuration file. If restoring fails (eventually partly), the init

action is called.

\fInrestore\fP is like \fIrestore\fP, but it notifies also the daemon

to do new rescan for available soundcards.

\fIinit\fP tries to initialize all devices to a default state. If device

is not known, error code 99 is returned.

\fIdaemon\fP manages to save periodically the sound state.

\fIrdaemon\fP like \fIdaemon\fP but restore the sound state at first.

\fIkill\fP notifies the daemon to do the specified operation (quit,

rescan, save_and_quit).

\fImonitor\fP is for monitoring the events received from the given

control device.

If no soundcards are specified, setup for all cards will be saved,

loaded or monitored.

.SH OPTIONS

.TP

\fI\-h, \-\-help\fP 

Help: show available flags and commands.

.TP

\fI\-d, \-\-debug\fP

Use debug mode: a bit more verbose.

.TP

\fI\-v, \-\-version\fP

Print alsactl version number.

.TP

\fI\-f, \-\-file\fP

Select the configuration file to use. The default is /var/lib/alsa/asound.state.

.TP

\fI\-l, \-\-lock\fP

Use the file locking to serialize the concurrent access to the state file (this

option is default for the global state file).

.TP

\fI\-L, \-\-no-lock\fP

Do not use the file locking to serialize the concurrent access to the state

file (including the global state file).

.TP

\fI\-O, \-\-lock-state-file\fP

Select the state lock file path.

.TP

\fI\-F, \-\-force\fP

Used with restore command.  Try to restore the matching control elements

as much as possible.  This option is set as default now.

.TP

\fI\-g, \-\-ignore\fP

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.

.TP

\fI\-P, \-\-pedantic\fP

Used with restore command.  Don't restore mismatching control elements.

This option was the old default behavior.

.TP

\fI\-I, \-\-no\-init\-fallback\fP

Don't initialize cards if restore fails.  Since version 1.0.18,

\fBalsactl\fP 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.

.TP

\fI\-r, \-\-runstate\fP

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.

.TP

\fI\-R, \-\-remove\fP

Remove runstate file at first.

.TP

\fI\-E, \-\-env\fP #=#

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).

.TP

\fI\-i, \-\-initfile\fP

The configuration file for init. By default, PREFIX/share/alsa/init/00main

is used.

.TP

\fI\-p, \-\-period\fP

The store period in seconds for the daemon command.

.TP

\fI\-e, \-\-pid-file\fP

The pathname to store the process-id file in the HDB UUCP format (ASCII).

.TP

\fI\-b, \-\-background\fP

Run the task in background.

.TP

\fI\-s, \-\-syslog\fP

Use syslog for messages.

.TP

\fI\-n, \-\-nice\fP

Set the process priority (see 'man nice')

.TP

\fI\-c, \-\-sched-idle\fP

Set the process scheduling policy to idle (SCHED_IDLE).

.TP

\fI\-D, \-\-ucm-defaults\fP

Execute also the 'defaults' section from the UCM configuration. The standard

behaviour is to execute only 'once' section.

.TP

\fI\-U, \-\-no-ucm\fP

Skip the UCM init even if available. It may be useful for the test the

legacy init configuration.

.SH FILES

\fI/var/lib/alsa/asound.state\fP (or whatever file you specify with the

\fB\-f\fP 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

\fBalsactl store\fP. 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).

.SH SEE ALSO

\fB

amixer(1),

alsamixer(1),

aplay(1),

alsactl_init(7)

\fP

.SH BUGS 

None known.

.SH AUTHOR

\fBalsactl\fP is by Jaroslav Kysela <perex@perex.cz> and Abramo Bagnara

<abramo@alsa\-project.org>. This document is by Paul Winkler <zarmzarm@erols.com>.