Man this stuff is hard for an old guy with no formal education. And it's kinda amazing, most of the time it's like "arrrgh...arrrgh...arrrgh" but then that one time it's like "OMFG BUAIDH MOFO" and that one time kinda makes up for all the "arrrghs"... does that make sense?

Started off today just wanting to tweak, that red color was obnoxious so I intended just to deal with that, ended up changing quite a bit and fixing a couple bugs along the way.

No more big list of channel names, finally figured out a simple way to detect that didn't drag in other depends, it's working great, pulling everything that's needed but also skipping simple toggles (i.e. auto-mute-mode, loopback etc., i'll add a function for those in a future update), soooo much less code. Fixed a bug where "Beep" was controlling the "Capture" slider. Added logic to remember what channels are muted as before the highlighting wouldn't survive re-starts.

Still only a 44.2k binary, tiny little powerhouse! Only going to get better, it's addicting I tell ya, lol.

Wow that took a long time, but version 2.0-1 is almost ready.

I tried various methods for detecting a given soundcard's controls and got it working mostly, but it literally doubled the size of the binary, 100% increase in size, not acceptable for just a small addition to a tiny utility. But had a thought yesterday while working at the library. The current app has slider names hardcoded, some 7 in all, and behavior is good in that if you don't have that particular slider name on your system, it simply won't add it to the GUI. So my low cost solution to that is that I added greatly to the number of potential slider names in the script, taken from my testing of various machines, suggestions made here (thanks!) and some internet searching, so now the app supports some 54 different controls and it's super easy to add more in the future, but as-is it ought to work for 90+% of most laptops and desktops. Had to add a scrollbar obviously. Only a 10% increase in code to do it that way, main binary is still under 50k.

I also added a mute/unmute function for the volume sliders that have a mute function, rather than take up extra space in the GUI with checkboxes or whatnot, I simply made it a right-click function, so now you can right-click on volume sliders and it will toggle mute/unmute and if the channel is muted now it has a big red box over it that shows very clearly that it's muted. Certainly there's a cleaner prettier way and at some point i'll work on the visual, but for now the function is up and running and that was the main point for this update.

Please feel free to post any channel names not on my list, here's the relevant code snippet so you can see what I have now:

*snip* deprecated

Here's a screenie of the working proto (re-sized to be smaller for the forum):

@stultumanto; wouldn't that be the same thing? Headphones with a mic is a headset unless i'm missing something here. Also:

When you get a chance would you mind listing some?

Working on detection last 2 days, been way more of a pain than I thought it would be but I have a rough working prototype, but it added quite a bit of code the way I did it, trying to figure out a simpler solution.

Another small issue that rears it's head on some machines like my cheap laptop is that alsamixer controls on the backend are not infinitely adjustable, they go up in increments depending on your sound card, like main volume in the terminal goes from 0 to 7 then 15 then 23 when you adjust it, and I have two controls which are worse on mine, the beep and mic boost go up in increments of 33, so it goes 0-33-67-100 and if you set it say at 45 in AT it will revert to 33 automatically when you open it again.

Re: Having AlsaTune and the terminal version of alsamixer open at the same time:
Forehead slapper, I only tested one direction, if you have both open and make changes in AlsaTune they immediately happen in alsamixer in realtime, just not vice versa.

Lol, not really that complex.

DuckDuckGo search terms: does cloudflare use ai to write code?

The answer at the top from the Duck's "search assist" (more ai, lol) :

Thoroughly reviewed bro...totally no hallucinating this time I swear...just push it, what's the worst that could happen bro?

So I got a nice e-mail from Dan the other day, he saw where I mentioned the radio player (danged if I can remember where I posted it though) and told me that the fellow that was maintaining it hasn't worked on it in a long time. So he gave me permission to mess with it. Neat little player, so simple!

I'm not going to go crazy, I already have a full-featured music player that i'm busy throwing all my crazy into, lol, i'm just going to go through the channels as there are several no longer playing or with different URL's now and replace those, maybe add a few more. And i'm going to add one little command to ffplay that cleans up the interface quite a bit when the music's playing. Other than that everything will stay true to his vision of the player.

It may be even crappier when i'm done, nobody, not even Miyo, can out-crapify ol' greenjeans.

I'll throw it up on the Sourceforge when it's done, be a couple days or so. I'll do a zip file like the original but i'd really like to do a .deb too for convenience.

@atlante I would go with what fsmithred said try. And if you get an error you can also try:

deb http://gnlug.org/pub/devuan/merged/ excalibur main non-free-firmware non-free contrib  
deb http://gnlug.org/pub/devuan/merged/ excalibur-updates main non-free-firmware non-free contrib 
deb http://gnlug.org/pub/devuan/merged/ excalibur-security main non-free-firmware non-free contrib 

That deb822 crap is for the birds. More useless flailing about, much like usrmerge.

It's KDE bro, lol.

Some folks just want a system that's a good tool to accomplish various tasks. (that's me)

But some folks want a complete immersive cinematic-style experience with lots of animations and transitions and assorted bouncing and blinging with every color of the rainbow flashing in their eyes, and omg must has rounded corners on EVERYTHING don't ya know.

Yeah the library machine (2013 E-machine) has no "mic boost" on it's card, so that field simply doesn't show up which is good behavior, but going forward I will need to poll the mixer backend at startup for the proper fields I guess. My skinny little app keeps growing.

Just saving it in an outboard file would be fine for regular use, but if the user cloned/snapshotted their system and wanted to install on another machine, then that file might no longer be correct for the new machine. These are the kinds of things I have to think about, especially in Vuu-do since from the get-go it's intended to be a "builder" system for folks to customize and then roll-their-own. For Vuu-do I could set an exclude in the Refracta configs for that file so it gets excluded and then re-built on first run in a new install, but for the standalone app that's not gonna fly.

Yeah that's an issue, I do have a second machine for testing down at the library and it has a mic but no internal mic. I'm marking this down in my notes as one of the first things to explore/work-on for the next version, figuring out various mic setups.

It will never work for 100% of cases out there, but by the time it's complete it will work for most, high time for a good Alsa GUI, it's just going to be slow going as i'm still learning here. So i'm just trying to knock it out with careful baby steps.

Really appreciate the feedback, it helps more than you know!

Weird. My install of Daedalus from 2023 shows libdvdcss2 as a package, but in the current debian repo it doesn't show it for bookworm, it shows it as provided by the libdvd-pkg package.

It's aggravating, harkens back to the issues with mp3 back in the day. It's really only one small .so file, if you make one it's actually portable at least across daedalus installs, you can just drop the .so in and it works.