Overview of the Audio Panel

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

The Audio Panel

The Audio Panel is Blueprint's hardware mixer. It shows the audio devices the machine has, and it sets their input and output levels. The program is cymix and its face is called Levels. The window is titled "Audio Panel".

It is the clean-room counterpart of the IRIX Audio Panel.

What It Controls, and What It Does Not

The Audio Panel drives the HARDWARE mixer. Moving a fader writes a real gain value to the sound card. Ticking Mute sets the card's mute.

It does not decide which sounds the desktop plays. Startup tunes, alert sounds and the keyboard bell are a different program with a different panel; see The Audio Panel and Desktop Sounds.

There is no master fader and no global mute. Every control belongs to one device and, usually, to one channel of it. The nearest thing to a master is choosing which device is the default.

Two Faces

cymix               the advanced mixer; this is the default
cymix --canonical   the measured IRIX Audio Panel, for archival

The advanced face is the one to use. It builds a strip for every device the control backend can reach, with working faders, mutes and meters.

The canonical face reproduces the appearance of the 1993 panel, in fixed pixel geometry, from measurements. Much of its menu surface is deliberately inert, because the original is being reproduced rather than reimplemented. See The Canonical Face before using it for anything but looking.

--extended is a deprecated spelling of --advanced. It still works.

In This Book

• Anatomy of the Window
• Setting Levels
• Meters, Peaks, and Clipping
• Devices and Backends
• The Menus
• Dialogs
• Keys and the Command Line
• Settings and Files
• The Canonical Face
• The Audio Panel and Desktop Sounds

If There Is No Sound Card

The panel does not show a wall of dead sliders. It says so:

No live mixer controls on this machine.
Control backend "null" is a seam or no sound card is present;
this face degrades cleanly rather than showing dead sliders.

See Devices and Backends.