FISCHE(1)

💖 FISCHE(1) 💖

okay bestie, gather round, because fische is here and she's standalone sound visualisation and she ate. no cap. this is the manual page for fische, a User Command, and honestly? iconic. 🎀

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✨ NAME ✨

fische — standalone sound visualisation 🦋

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

fische [options]

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

• -D, --driver driver — pick which audio input driver you wanna use, queen. right now alsa, pulse, portaudio and dummy are the ones that show up to the party.
• -d, --device device — device is the name of the pcm capture device where we're getting the sound data from. on most systems the default is literally fine, don't stress. 🫶 this option gets ignored entirely with the PulseAudio driver. the PortAudio driver knows a special device called help, and if you use that it will spit out a whole list of every device it knows about. so helpful.
• -g, --geometry XxY — X and Y say how wide and how tall the animation is. defaults to 800x400. ✨
• -v, --virtual XxY — X and Y say how wide and how tall the application window is. use this so your computer doesn't try to switch to some fullscreen resolution that doesn't even exist (embarrassing for it tbh). CAUTION: when you're specifying a virtual geometry, set the actual geometry FIRST! order matters, bestie, do not skip that step. 💀
• -f, --fullscreen — start fische in fullscreen mode. main character energy, full screen. 👑
• -e, --extra-nervous — start fische in nervous mode. she's anxious, she's jittery, we love her. 🙈
• -s, --fps fps — fps is the target frames per second. the default, 30, is literally what fische was designed for. that's her vibe.
• -1, --single — use only one CPU, even if there are more available. sometimes you just gotta do it solo. 💜
• --exit-on-mouseevent — exit the moment a mouse button gets clicked. super useful, mainly on touchscreens. 🍓
• -n, --nowrite — do not update the configuration file with the last known working configuration. no notes, she just won't write.
• -h, --help — display a basic help message. a little snack of info. 🎀

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🌈 RUNTIME CONTROLS 🌈

once she's running, you got hands-on controls, bestie:

• press P to pause
• press F to toggle fullscreen mode
• press N to toggle nervosity
• press ESC to quit

and if you started her with the --exit-on-mouseevent flag, fische does exactly that. mouse button clicked → she's gone. periodt. 💅

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😭 KNOWN ISSUES 😭

PortAudio is currently slow on Linux. if you're able to, use a different driver. fr fr, save yourself.

On Windows, the actual frame rate is often quite different from the one you specified. ngl that's just how it is. the actual rate gets shown after exit — so use the -s flag to increase it to about 30. ✨

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🧚 TROUBLESHOOTING (Linux only) 🧚

If you get an error like "X Error of failed request: BadValue..."

try to start fische with the -v or --virtual flags and set X/Y to values that correspond to a fullscreen resolution that you know exists. for example:

fische -g 1400x700 -v 1400x1050

see? she's fine now. 🫶

If fische starts, but won't react to sound

first of all, try a different input driver. if you're lucky, this already solves your whole problem. slay. ✨

if not, you now have to choose which driver you would like to get working:

• pulse: fische opens the default source as set with pavucontrol or similar tools. for example, if you would like to visualize "what's playing", set the corresponding "monitor of output XYZ" device as default.
• alsa: you might be using the wrong ALSA device. by default, fische tries to open the "default" device. it should be correctly configured on most systems, but with some soundcards you need complex ALSA configuration to achieve recording capabilities — go look into the ALSA documentation. for example, soundcards with ICE1712 chips record internally produced sound on channels 10 and 11 instead of 0 and 1. wild, i know.
• alsa: recording might not be enabled. check with "alsamixer" or another mixer application. if you're trying to visualize sounds produced by an audio player, you must enable recording of what's called "PCM" on most cards. for external input, record "Line In", and so on...
• alsa: your sound card might not support recording of your chosen source. in this case, you are in bad luck. 💀 most notably, many C-Media based cards do not allow recording while SPDIF out is in use. you can try a setup using an "aloop" dummy card — but that process is far beyond the scope of this man page, and with most distributions it requires kernel or ALSA re-compilation. however! in this case the PulseAudio input driver might still give you the desired results. so don't give up. 🌸

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🎀 FILES 🎀

• $HOME/.fischerc — automatically updated on clean exit.

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

runtime control documentation, troubleshooting information and FAQs in the README. iykyk, go read it. 📖

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💖 AUTHOR 💖

this manual page was written by Marcel Ebmer fische@26elf.at. permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Version 2, or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. ✨

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and that's the whole page, bestie! this one's fische, from the source/version that shipped it, dated April 2010. she's old, she's iconic, she still slays. go visualize some sound. 💅🎀💖