In the days of OSS, Emacspeak had a nice Emacs-interface to
aumix
and it is a piece of functionality that I have missed even more
under ALSA,
given that one can do many more sophisticated tweaks to one's
sound-card.
Tool alsamixer --- a full-screen terminal
application is bewilderingly confusing (at least to me),
and amixer though usable required me to go find out
how it worked each time I needed to do something new.
The final straw came last weekend when I tried to record some
Emacspeak demos using recordmydesktop
and needed to configure ALSA so that it would capture sound
directly from the PCM output, rather than the microphone.
To cut a short story even shorter,
I ended up writing an Emacs wrapper around amixer
called --- well, you guessed it, amixer.
The code is checked in as
amixer.el.
The Emacspeak keybinding C-e ( formerly used to
manipulate aumix is now ALSA-aware
and will intelligently default to using the new
amixer tool if
/usr/bin/amixer is available.
