Bringing back /dev/pcm

Taking a peek in /dev/snd one might find device files for their sound card(s). Sequencers, Timers, midi, and pcm device files. I thought it might be interesting to apply a modern face lift to these devices; so now libferrris can mount pulseaudio and has write support for gstreamer.

What this means is you can write "audio" data to a virtual filesystem and have it play that back for you:

$ cat /tmp/sample.flac | ferris-redirect -T gstreamer://output/audio

ferris-redirect is like the shell pipe character but allows direct access to libferris filesystems without mount commands. The -T truncates, so it is like a ">|" bash redirection.

I also plan to make these output directories special. If you write to them like they are a file as in the above then it puts your data there. If you create a subfile and write to it you will be essentially writing to the output file itself. With that you could "cp" a directory of audio files to gstreamer://output/audio and they will play one at a time until you have copied them all to your speakers ;)

$ ferriscp -av /tmp/bongos-dir gstreamer://output/audio

Pulseaudio is available at pulseaudio:// or the shortcut pa://. The tree currently allows you to mute and alter the volume for playing streams and whole output devices. Reading a volume file will tell you the percentage that channel outputs at (or the average for volume-all). Writing a float to the volume files changes the volume to suit your request. The mute files similarly show if the audio is muted and allow you to set that by writing 1 or 0 to the file.

$ fls -0 pa://output/default
mute 0
volume-0 0.729996
volume-1 0.729996
volume-2 0.729996
volume-3 0.729996
volume-4 0.729996
volume-5 0.729996
volume-all 0.729996

$ echo 0.7 | ferris-redirect -T \
"pulseaudio://streams/amarok/Audio Stream/volume-all"

All this ferris-redirect stuff can have it's additional typing mitigated using a suitable inputrc.

For example:
$ cat ~/.inputrc
$include /etc/inputrc
">>>": "| ferris-redirect "
">>|": "| ferris-redirect -T "

This will be in the next libferris release tarball. Things slowly get closer for the libferris QML mobile audio app. You can already do index and search with libferris and get at the results as a QModel for use in QML, now you can also set volumes and "copy" sound to the earphones.