%general-entities; ]> ALSA Utilities-&alsa-utils-version; Introduction to <application><acronym>ALSA</acronym> Utilities</application> The ALSA Utilities package contains various utilities which are useful for controlling your sound card. Package information Download (HTTP): Download (FTP): Download size: &alsa-utils-size; Estimated Disk space required: &alsa-utils-buildsize; Estimated build time: &alsa-utils-time; <application><acronym>ALSA</acronym> Utilities</application> dependencies Required Installation of <application><acronym>ALSA</acronym> Utilities</application> Install ALSA Utilities by running the following commands: ./configure && make && make install Configuring <application><acronym>ALSA</acronym> Utilities</application> Config files /etc/asound.state Configuration Information Probably the easiest way to store mixer levels is to set and retrieve them using a bootscript. It is possible to do this with a post-install line in /etc/modules.conf but this is left as an exercise for those readers who wish to do this. The ALSA Driver package installs a script as /etc/rc.d/init.d/alsasound. While it is possible to use this script, it contains a lot of extraneous detail which isn't needed on an LFS system. Instead, install the init script /etc/rc.d/init.d/alsa included in the package. make install-alsa Note that all channels of your sound card are muted by default. You can use the alsamixer program from ALSA Utilities (or any other OSS mixer) to change this. The first time the above script is run, it will complain that there is no state in /etc/asound.state. You can prevent this by running the following commands after installing ALSA Utilities: touch /etc/asound.state && alsactl store A final note is that the lines loading sfxload are commented out. They are there as an example of other things you may wish to do in the startup script. sfxload is a separate package of interest to SoundBlaster AWE and Live! users. It is designed for loading "sound-fonts" (which are used for MIDI output). You may wish to delete these lines and add your own or, if you have the relevant sound card, install sfxload and uncomment them. Contents The ALSA Utilities package contains aconnect, alsactl, alsamixer, amixer, aplay, arecord and aseqnet. Description aconnect aconnect is a utility for connecting and disconnecting two existing ports in the ALSA sequencer system. alsactl alsactl is used to control advanced settings for the ALSA sound card drivers. alsamixer alsamixer is an ncurses-based mixer program for use with the ALSA sound card drivers. amixer amixer allows command-line control of the mixers for the ALSA sound card drivers. aplay aplay is a command-line soundfile player for the ALSA sound card drivers. arecord arecord is a command-line soundfile recorder for the ALSA sound card drivers. aseqnet aseqnet is an ALSA sequencer client which sends and receives event packets over a network.