Devices and Backends

Documentation / Contents - Audio Panel

• Overview of the Audio Panel
  • What It Controls, and What It Does Not
  • Two Faces
  • If There Is No Sound Card
• Anatomy of the Window
  • The Device Area
  • A Strip, Top to Bottom
  • The Control Rows
  • The Message Line
  • Selecting a Strip
• Setting Levels
  • The Faders
  • Group Sliders
  • Mute
  • Monitor
  • Meter
  • Sample Rate
  • What Is Not Persisted
• Meters, Peaks, and Clipping
  • Turning Them On
  • The dB Ladder
  • How They Move
  • When There Is No Signal
• Devices and Backends
  • Backends
  • The Default Input and Output
  • Choosing What Is Shown
  • Pinning a Device
  • Input Source and Output Destination
• The Menus
  • File
  • Selected
  • View
  • Options
  • Default
  • Help
  • The Button 3 Menu
• Dialogs
  • Open and Save As
  • Device Preferences
  • About
• Keys and the Command Line
  • Keys
  • The Headless Command Line
  • Diagnostics
    • Finding the Right Mixer Stage
• Settings and Files
  • The Configuration File
  • What Is Deliberately Not Saved
  • Environment Variables
• The Canonical Face
  • What Is Different
  • What Works
  • What Is Inert
  • Honest About Its Own Evidence
• The Audio Panel and Desktop Sounds
  • The Difference
  • Which One Do I Want

Other cards

• Copyright Information

Devices and Backends

Backends

The panel reaches the hardware through one control backend, chosen for you at startup. Which one is available depends on the machine:

alsa       Linux
mixerctl   NetBSD and OpenBSD, through the native mixer device
null       always present; the floor, and controls nothing

Three more names exist as honest seams rather than working backends: irixal, sunaudio and sndio. They report every operation as unsupported instead of pretending.

Force one with -backend:

cymix -backend alsa

A backend name that does not exist fails outright rather than quietly falling back to null.

The startup banner on stderr names the backend and how many devices it found.

The Default Input and Output

Default > Input and Default > Output list the devices of each direction and let you pick which is the default. Selected > Make Default Input, or Make Default Output on an output strip, does the same for the selected strip.

Choosing What Is Shown

The View menu decides which strips appear.

Default Input      show the default input strip
Default Output     show the default output strip
<device name>      one toggle per device found
Show Device List   Ctrl+D, a list of every device down the side

By default the two Default entries are on and the individual devices are off, so a plain machine shows two strips. If no device claims to be a default, every strip is shown instead of none.

Show Device List opens a column titled "Audio Devices" with a row per device; ticking a row adds that device to the view.

Pinning a Device

To make the panel always open on a particular device rather than whatever the system calls the default, set input_device or output_device in the configuration file. See Settings and Files.

A pinned device that the machine no longer has is reported loudly rather than ignored.

Looking at the Hardware Without a Window

cymix --probe        print the parsed audio probe and exit
cymix -print         print the default output's gain and mute
cymix --dump-geometry  print the face metrics, headless

--probe exits non-zero when it found nothing usable. The probe is a shell script shipped alongside the panel; the canonical face reads it for its display values.

Input Source and Output Destination

Selected > Input Source lists Camera Mic, Microphone, Line In, DAC1 In and DAC2 In. Output Destination lists Speaker/Line Out and Line Out 2.

These are the IRIX panel's literal strings, not your card's. Choosing one relabels the strip and restarts the meter, and does not switch the real input on the card. The genuine control is the mixer's record source selector. Treat this menu as unfinished.

Next

• The Menus
• Settings and Files