RANDOMSOUND(8)

📦 version 0.2, in ubuntu jammy

💖 RANDOMSOUND 💖

okay bestie, so this is the randomsound page from section 8 of the System Manager's Manual, and it is literally the ALSA sound card related entropy gathering daemon. yes. your sound card. making randomness. iconic behavior honestly 🎀

✨ NAME ✨

randomsound — ALSA sound card related entropy gathering daemon. that's the whole vibe. 🦋

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

randomsound [options]

👑 DESCRIPTION 👑

so here's the tea: randomsound takes the low order bit of the ADC output of your sound card, gathers entropy from it, debiases it, and then offers it up to your kernel's random pool. it's giving "your microphone noise is actually a gift" 💅

you can tweak it so it only writes into the pool when the pool drops below a certain level, and so it backs off once the pool is full enough. no cap, that's a real setting.

heads up though: this build will set your sound card into 16 bit mono unsigned input at 8KHz. if your sound card cannot do that, then you will need to change the defines in asoundrunner.c and recompile the package. that's just how it is, bestie 😭

also you must have set up asound as root on your machine. you can do that with the asoundconf tool and its set-default-card command. root privileges, periodt.

you may also need to use the alsamixer to make sure your sound card is generating plenty of noise. set all the gains nice and high, turn on any boosters you have. if you have a V_REFLVL or something similar then consider tweaking that too. crank it, fr fr 🌈

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

  • -D — daemonize. it goes and lives in the background like a little ghost 👻
  • -v — increase verbosity. can be used more than once, so go off, stack it up ✨
  • -m — specify minimum number of bits of entropy in the pool.
  • -M — specify max number of bits in the pool.
  • -b — specify number of bytes of randomness to buffer for use.
  • -d — specify number of bytes to deposit into the pool each time.
  • -h — display help message.
  • -V — display version information.

💜 AUTHOR 💜

randomsound was written by Daniel Silverstone <dsilvers@digital-scurf.org>. king behavior, we love to see it 🫶

and that's the whole page, bestie! this one came from Pepperfish, dated August 18, 2007 — yeah it's an oldie but she's still serving. mwah, go gather some entropy 💖🎀✨
📦 where this page comes from