wmix(1x)

✨ wmix — the manual page, but make it cute ✨

okay bestie, you found the wmix(1x) page, and honestly? it's a little icon. it's a dockapp mixer for OSS or ALSA, and by the end of this you're gonna be adjusting volume like it's your job. let's go 💅

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🎀 NAME 🎀

wmix — Dockapp mixer for OSS or ALSA

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

wmix [options...]
wmix -h

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so it's a docked application that controls your audio mixer, for either OSS or ALSA. and it does a lot for such a tiny little thing: toggling the record source, muting individual channels, adjusting volume and balance — all of it crammed into a compact dockapp size, with a TV-like on-screen-display for volume levels. it's giving main character energy in a 64x64 box, no cap.

it supports the mouse wheel to adjust the current channel's volume, it also supports the volume control keys on "multimedia" keyboards, and you can control it remotely with unix signals SIGUSR1/SIGUSR2 to raise/lower the volume. and it keeps a simple configuration file for your user-defined settings. obsessed. 💖

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• -d <display> — connect to a remote X display
• -e <name> — exclude a channel from control (peep CHANNEL NAMES below)
• -f <file> — use this config file instead of ~/.wmixrc
• -h — display the list of command-line options
• -k — disable grabbing the audio volume control keys on the keyboard (see BUGS below, it matters)
• -m <device> — use the specified mixer device instead of /dev/mixer
• -v — verbose start, report detected channels

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🍓 CONFIGURATION FILE 🍓

if it's readable, the file ~/.wmixrc — or whatever file you pointed at with -f — gets read on startup. it can contain one configuration command per line:

• device=<mixer_device> — defines the device file to use instead of /dev/mixer
• exclude=<channel_name> — excludes the specified channel from control, and you can use this as many times as you need (see CHANNEL NAMES below)
• mousewheel=<0|1> — when set to 0, disables volume control through the mouse wheel (default=1)
• osd=<0|1> — when set to 0, disables display of the volume in an OSD-like fashion (default=1)
• osdcolor=<color> — specifies the color used for the OSD volume display. it can be the name of a color (see /usr/share/X11/rgb.txt) or an RGB specification (as rgb:<red>/<green>/<blue> with hexadecimal numbers) as expected by X11 (default=green)
• scrolltext=<0|1> — when set to 0, disables text scrolling to display the name of the current selected channel, and uses the static short name instead (default=1)
• wheelbtn1=<button> wheelbtn2=<button> — defines the button events associated in X11 to the mouse wheel, with btn1 for up and btn2 for down (default: btn1=4 and btn2=5)
• wheelstep=<percentage> — sets the volume change step when using the mouse wheel, specified as a percentage of the total volume range (i.e.: 1 < value < 100, default=3). for compatibility, values between 0.0 and 1.0 will be considered as a raw percentage

you can also drop comments in the file using the # character, in which case everything from that character to the end of the line gets ignored. periodt. 💅

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🌈 CHANNEL NAMES 🌈

the names for the different channels are provided by ALSA/OSS as short names, and wmix provides a long name match for readability. the default behavior is to scroll the long name of the current channel in the text line of the dockapp, but if you disable the scroll text then the short name gets displayed instead.

if you wanna exclude a channel from the list of channels controlled by the dockapp, you have to use the short name. you can get the list of all the channels available in your sound card with wmix -v, and the short name will be between parentheses. here's an example:

Supported channels:
  1: Master volume      (Vol  )
  2: PC Speaker         (Spkr )
  3: PCM Wave 2 volume  (Pcm2 )
  4: Input gain         (IGain)
  5: Phone output       (PhoneOut)

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💜 FILES 💜

• ~/.wmixrc — user configuration file (change it with option -f)
• ~/.wmix.pid — contains the process id of wmix, in case you'd need it for SIGUSR1/SIGUSR2 volume control
• /dev/mixer — device used for controlling volume (change it with option -m or with the device command in the config file)
• /usr/share/doc/wmix/README — more information on the user interface

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💀 BUGS 💀

ngl bestie, read this part. it's important.

the mute functionality is implemented by setting the volume to 0 and remembering the previous volume to restore it when unmuting. while this is perfectly ok, you may encounter strange-looking behavior if you have other applications controlling the volume, and possibly implementing mute in similar ways, because there is no way to know that a channel has been muted. 😭

the X server allows only one application at a time to place a grab on a key, so if another application already claimed the volume control keys, then wmix will warn you about it and continue without the functionality. if, on the other hand, you encounter problems with applications that do not work because they could not grab these keys (a typical symptom is an X Error of type BadAccess with major opcode 33 X_GrabKey), you can ask wmix to not grab them using the command line option -k.

if you modify the configuration file, do not expect wmix to reload it automatically — this is considered a too-costly feature for such a small application. no auto-reload for you, sorry babe 🙈

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👑 AUTHORS 👑

this man page was written by Fredrik Steen <stone@debian.org> for the Debian distribution. it was expanded by Christophe CURIS for the Window Maker Dev Team.

wmix was written by Tim, timecop <timecop@japan.co.jp>, with some code by Daniel Richard G. <skunk@mit.edu> and some addition by Christophe CURIS.

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and that's the whole thing, bestie 💖 this was wmix, version 3.2, page credit to Fredrik Steen. go forth and mix those channels like the icon you are. slay ✨🦋🎀