Oh baby where have you been all my life?

I just found the mixer(8) command on my BSD powered laptop when looking through the handbook.


This rocks !


Every now and then I like to adjust my sound volume, on the laptop I usually have music going all of the time. I've got kmix docked iso I can open and adjust it but that kind of sucks. Because I have to swap from keyboard to mouse or worse mouse-jet around to go from what I was doing to adjusting the sound. Some times the volume slider in my systray really is the best way for that.


Now when I could just suspend Vim and use mixer to adjust it without leaving my shell, that is perfect!

$ mixer
Mixer vol      is currently set to  50:50
Mixer pcm      is currently set to  25:25
Mixer speaker  is currently set to  81:81
Mixer line     is currently set to  75:75
Mixer mic      is currently set to   0:0
Mixer cd       is currently set to  75:75
Mixer rec      is currently set to   0:0
Mixer igain    is currently set to   0:0
Mixer ogain    is currently set to  50:50
Recording source: mic
$ mixer -s
vol 50:50 pcm 25:25 speaker 81:81 line 75:75 mic 0:0 cd 75:75 rec 0:0 igain 0:0 ogain 50:50 =rec mic%                                                          
$ mixer pcm 0:0
Setting the mixer pcm from 25:25 to 0:0.
$ mixer pcm 25:25
Setting the mixer pcm from 0:0 to 25:25.
$

I set the PCM/Wave to 0 and then back to 25% left and right effectively muting an unmuting my sound. Since some programs will modify the PCM/Wave setting when changing the volume, like MPlayer and XMMS do by default. While others like Xine based stuff (Kaffeine and Amarok for example) are poilite enough not to dick with the system sound settings.


I've come to setting my Volume to 50% and adjusting the PCM setting at will. I could probably make most programs use there own virtual channel and not screw with the overall sound but on my laptop I rarely have a need for it.


I would rather like it if I could do some thing like that on my Windows machine though, so I could for example adjust volumes independently for some applications that don't support software mixing on windows. Which means all of there sounds run at the settings in windows control center... Like XFires message beeps (ugh) but with how the sound works on my desktop with the Audigy 4.... I'm just happy if I can play Raven Shield and listen to music in any thing _other_ then WMP and not get a BSOD quite often when using the server browser in Rvs!