Knowledge Base (Posts about pulseaudio)

one-program-audio popup utility

bgstack15 — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 14:14:00 GMT

Following up on my previous post about a cli-to-mute-one-application, I now have a small graphical volume popup! It offers a slider and also a mute toggle.

The program closes after so many seconds of inactivity, so you can just change the volume, and click back into the intended program.

cli to mute one application

bgstack15 — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 13:58:00 GMT

This isn't the biggest deal in the world, but I wanted to toggle a single program's audio without having to navigate the pulseaudio menus/applications. I wanted to mute Civ2.

files/2025/listings/mute-one-application.sh (Source)

#!/bin/sh
index="$( pactl --format=json list sink-inputs | jq ".[]? | select(.properties.\"application.name\" | startswith(\"civ2\")) | .index" )
pactl set-sink-input-mute "${index}" toggle

Find the sink-input associated with the exact process I am interested in, and then toggle the mute.

Devuan laptop: use external monitor with sound

bgstack15 — Sun, 08 Jun 2025 12:35:00 GMT

I used arandr to set up 2-monitor display after plugging in the HDMI display, and saved the config to ~/.screenlayout/2mon.sh. I then added the pulseaudio command to set the default profile to output audio to the hdmi.

xrandr --output eDP-1 --primary --mode 1920x1080 --pos 0x0 --rotate normal --output DP-1 --off --output HDMI-1 --off --output DP-2 --off --output HDMI-2 --mode 1920x1080 --pos 1920x0 --rotate normal
pacmd set-card-profile 0 output:hdmi-stereo

References

pacmd interactive terminal

PulseAudio send audio to 2 outputs

bgstack15 — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 14:05:00 GMT

If you want to send audio to multiple outputs (that are not a part of the built-in sound card such as the headphone jack and the speaker jack) at the same time, you can use a feature of pulseaudio to accomplish this.

Technically this will generate a new sink that will send to all possible outputs, so I hope that is sufficient. I didn't dabble with the module parameters for listing the intended slave sinks.

You load an additional pulseaudio module, such as with this command. It does not give a custom name or choose specific sinks to use so it will use all sinks.

pactl load-module module-combine-sink

Or put this in your file /etc/pulse/default.pa.d/local.pa or similar:

load-module module-combine-sink sink_name=combined sink_properties=device.description="combined"
set-default-sink combined

If you do not give a short description (what lots of paradigms would call "display name"), it will use the default one which lists all devices, and it can overwhelm your menus when choosing an output device!

References

Weblinks

pulseaudio - Play sound through two or more outputs/devices - Ask Ubuntu

Change default audio input on Devuan with Pulseaudio

bgstack15 — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 12:45:53 GMT

I switched to pulseaudio recently, which means some of my workflows have changed.

I learned how to use pulseaudio command lines to set my default input. Apparently the default gets reset when I unplug my headset.

files/2024/listings/use-mic.sh (Source)

#!/bin/sh
# Startdate: 2024-02-25-1 20:36
# https://askubuntu.com/questions/14077/how-can-i-change-the-default-audio-device-from-command-line
pacmd set-default-source alsa_input.pci-0000_00_1f.3.analog-stereo

Pacmd worked well with autocomplete, and I already knew my correct info name was "analog stereo."

And now, so monitor when my headphones get plugged in, I had to install acpid for this daemon which I've added to my ~/.fluxbox/startup script.

files/2024/listings/daemon-use-mic.sh (Source)

#!/bin/sh
# startdate: 2024-02-26-2 08:07
# Reference:
#    https://askubuntu.com/questions/1267949/how-do-i-automatically-switch-pulseaudio-input-to-headset-upon-connection/1284966#1284966
# Dependencies:
#    acpid, pulseaudio

# just in case we drop use-mic.sh
index="$( pacmd list-sources | grep -E 'index|ports|analog-input-headset-mic' | grep -E '\*\sindex:\s+[0-9]' | awk '{print $NF}' )"

acpi_listen | while IFS= read -r line ;
do
   echo "${line}" | grep -qE "HEADPHONE plug" 1>/dev/null 2>&1 && /usr/local/bin/use-mic.sh ;
   # or we could run "pacmd set-source-port ${index} analog-input-headset-mic
done

References

Weblinks

Helper script: pulsemixer-notification

bgstack15 — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 13:18:32 GMT

Story

Due to a minor hardware problem where my sound card keeps jumping from aplay -l position 0 to position 1, my wine malfunctioned with audio. I set the specific card to use in the winecfg tab for Audio. After a reboot (and the alsa card position switched again), winecfg would crash on the Audio tab and I was unable to figure how to wipe the settings back to all defaults. This wine audio problem meant everything in wine that uses audio (every game) crashes. It was frustrating.

So I bit the bullet and installed pulseaudio on my Devuan GNU+Linux desktop. It was a matter of adding start-pulseaudio-x11 & to ~/.fluxbox/startup. I learned you need to keep alsa-utils and alsamixergui installed. Pulseaudio sits on top of alsa instead of replacing it.

There is a great program named pulsemixer that is a very powerful TUI and CLI tool for controlling your inputs and outputs. But I still needed alsamixer to disable the "auto-mute" when I plug in headphones, because I accidentally discovered a few years ago that if sound comes out of both speakers and headphones, it makes my life easier. I'm probably weird for that reason (and dozens of others), but I like it and I'm going to keep it that way, and it takes alsamixer to control that. (Take that, ... atheists? pulseaudio peeps anyways.)

So, pulsemixer does provide a great, simple way to toggle mute, and change volume up and down. I was only missing notifications about changing the volume.

Configuring other apps

volumeicon

I still use volumeicon but now I have configured middle-click to "open mixer," with mixer defined as pulsemixer --togle-mute. I found that while the volumeicon can still use its built-in "Mute Volume" setting, it mutes it on the alsa level, which mutes the master volume in pulseaudio, but it cannot unmute that pulseaudio master volume. So it is now always muted until I use pulsemixer.

I also had to disable volumeicon from handling the XF86AudioRaiseVolume keypresses. For that, I modified my fluxbox config.

fluxbox

For bare pulsemixer control you can just run:

122 :Exec pulsemixer --change-volume -5
123 :Exec pulsemixer --change-volume +5
121 :Exec pulsemixer --toggle-mute

Which worked well but it doesn't have a cute little popup telling me what the current volume level is. So I had to write the following script, and configure fluxbox to use it.

121 :Exec pulsemixer-notification toggle
122 :Exec pulsemixer-notification down
123 :Exec pulsemixer-notification up

The script

Explanation

This script displays a relative volume level (0/33/66/100) and muted symbol. It will always unmute if you change volume, which is the behavior I expect because that's how alsa handled volume. A neat little feature is that it uses a notification ID, so it can replace it if you're scrolling up on the volume; it will just replace the current notification instead of slowly (1.25s per step) trickling through them.

Listing

files/2023/10/listings/pulsemixer-notification (Source)

#!/bin/sh
# File: pulsemixer-notification
# Location: /usr/bin
# Author: bgstack15
# Startdate: 2023-10-04-4 09:06
# SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-3.0
# Title: pulsemixer wrapper script that includes notifications
# Package: bgscripts
# Purpose: wrap around pulsemixer hotkey invocations to include status notifications
# History:
# Usage:
#    In ~/.fluxbox/keys:
#       121 :Exec pulsemixer-notification toggle
#       122 :Exec pulsemixer-notification down
#       123 :Exec pulsemixer-notification up
# Reference:
# Improve:
# Dependencies:
#    devuan-dep: pulsemixer, pulseaudio, notify-send
# Documentation:

# Load configuration
test -z "${devtty}" && devtty=/dev/null
test -z "${PN_TEMPFILE}" && PN_TEMPFILE=~/.cache/audio.temp
test -z "${PN_STEP}" && PN_STEP=3
test -z "${PN_EXPIRE_MS}" && PN_EXPIRE_MS=1250
test -f "${HOME}/.config/pulsemixer-notification" && . "${HOME}/.config/pulsemixer-notification"
test -f "/etc/pulsemixer-notification.conf" && . "/etc/pulsemixer-notification.conf"

# runtime
exec 1>>"${devtty}"
action="${1}"
unset icon vol relative_level message replacestring

case "${action}" in
   toggle)
      pulsemixer --toggle-mute
      case "$( pulsemixer --get-mute )" in
         0)
            action="unmute"
            ;;
         1)
            icon="audio-volume-muted"
            message="muted"
            ;;
      esac
      ;;
   up) pulsemixer --unmute ; pulsemixer --change-volume +"${PN_STEP}" ;;
   down) pulsemixer --unmute ; pulsemixer --change-volume -"${PN_STEP}" ;;
   *)
      echo "unknown: ${action}"
      ;;
esac

get_vol_level() {
   vol="$( pulsemixer --get-volume | awk '{print $1}' )"
   is_low="$( printf '%s\n' "${vol}<=33" | bc )"
   is_med="$( printf '%s\n' "(${vol}<=66)*(${vol}>33)" | bc )"
   is_hih="$( printf '%s\n' "${vol}>66" | bc )"
   is_off="$( printf '%s\n' "${vol}==0" | bc )"
   test "${is_low}" = "1" && printf '%s' "low" && return 0
   test "${is_med}" = "1" && printf '%s' "medium" && return 0
   test "${is_hih}" = "1" && printf '%s' "high" && return 0
   test "${is_off}" = "1" && printf '%s' "muted" && return 0
}

# awk: cheat and just use left-side volume of stereo volume.
vol="$( pulsemixer --get-volume | awk '{print $1}' )"
relative_level="$( get_vol_level )"

case "${action}" in
   up|down)
      icon="audio-volume-${relative_level}"
      message="${vol}"
      ;;
   unmute)
      icon="audio-volume-${relative_level}"
      message="unmuted"
      ;;
esac

test -f "${PN_TEMPFILE}" && replacestring="--replace-id=$( cat "${PN_TEMPFILE}" 2>/dev/null )"
# leave replacestring unquoted in case it is empty
notify-send ${replacestring} --icon "${icon}" --transient "${message}" --urgency low --expire-time "${PN_EXPIRE_MS}" --print-id > "${PN_TEMPFILE}"