Keys and the Command Line

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

Keys

These work on the advanced face.

Ctrl+O     File > Open...
Ctrl+S     File > Save
Ctrl+Q     File > Exit
Ctrl+R     Selected > Sample Rate
Ctrl+D     View > Show Device List
Ctrl+P     Options > Professional Mode
Ctrl+B     Options > Show Scrollbar
Ctrl+H     Options > Show Quick Help
Shift+F1   Help > Click for Help

Alt and the underlined letter posts a menu: F, S, V, O, D, H for File, Selected, View, Options, Default and Help.

Mouse

Button 1 on a strip   select it
Button 3 on a strip   select it and post the short menu
drag a fader          set the level; it is written at once

The canonical face shows Shift+F1 beside Click for Help but has no working accelerators. The text is part of the reproduction.

The Headless Command Line

The panel has a command line in the style of the IRIX audiopanel: a leading single dash, no bundling. Any one of these runs before any display work and exits. Nothing shells out, so a machine with no card reports honestly instead of faking success.

cymix -print                  print the target device's gain and mute
cymix -nodisplay              apply -gain and -mute, print, exit
cymix -defaultout             operate on the default output; the default
cymix -defaultin              operate on the default input
cymix -device ID              operate on a named device, for example hw:0
cymix -channel L|R|all        which channel -gain applies to
cymix -gain PERCENT           set gain, 0 to 100
cymix -mute on|off|toggle     set mute
cymix -monitor on|off|PCT     route the default input to the output
cymix -backend NAME           force a control backend

L and R may be spelled 0 and 1. Mute takes 1 and 0 as well as on and off.

Set the default output to 60 percent with no window:

cymix -nodisplay -gain 60

Mute the default input's left channel:

cymix -nodisplay -defaultin -channel L -mute on

-monitor on routes your microphone to your speakers. Use headphones.

Diagnostics

cymix --probe          the parsed audio probe
cymix --peak-probe     five seconds of live peaks, headless
cymix --probe-chain    find which mixer stage carries capture
cymix --dump-geometry  the face metrics
cymix --dryrun         report what would run, open nothing
cymix --selftest       the built-in checks

Finding the Right Mixer Stage

On some codecs the panel cannot tell which mixer control carries the capture signal, or which one is playthrough. That is why the Monitor checkbox is sometimes insensitive.

cymix --probe-chain

measures each stage in turn while you make noise at the microphone, and on a terminal asks which one you can hear. It restores every stage afterwards and prints two lines to keep:

CY_CTL_CAPTURE_STAGE="..."
CY_CTL_MONITOR_STAGE="..."

Put those in your environment and the fader and the Monitor checkbox will drive the right controls.

Exit Status

0   success
1   the probe found nothing usable, a check failed, or no device
2   a usage error, or an out-of-range value

Next

• Settings and Files
• The Canonical Face