Is there a way to detect if any sound is playing (using a bash script)?
(I'm on Ubuntu 11.10 using pulseaudio.)
I plan on using it in an indicator to visually remind me sound is playing while the mute is on.
1 Answer
Using pulse-audio: You can try pactl list to see what pulse audio is doing with the sound hardware. I'm leaving the specifics of pulling out the status to you. For e.g.: This command would list the Sink and Source states.
pactl list | grep State
Using procfs for ALSA (Caveat: these proc entries might go away in the future): This snippet runs through the pcm playback devices in ALSA proc heirarchy.
if grep -q RUNNING /proc/asound/card*/*p/*/status 2>&1; then
echo "Playing"
else
echo "Idle"
fi
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Thanks a lot!
pactl listis working for me. Volume, mute status, etc. How did you find this out? I've been searching for "pulseaudio status" and nothing this simple came up.dgo.a– dgo.a2012-02-25 13:35:08 +00:00Commented Feb 25, 2012 at 13:35 -
No problem :-) Find out the tools that come along with pulseaudio, then take a guess on the which one might be appropriate, check the man pages, try running it.Anil– Anil2012-02-25 15:14:11 +00:00Commented Feb 25, 2012 at 15:14
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pactl listoutput is locale-dependent and will be shown according to$LANG.That Brazilian Guy– That Brazilian Guy2022-02-06 20:34:01 +00:00Commented Feb 6, 2022 at 20:34 -
pactlhas a "short" format that's meant for parsing in scripts according toman pactl. In my case, I can usepactl list short sinks | cut --fields=5to get theRUNNING/IDLEstate directly.Shane S.– Shane S.2022-05-29 18:45:47 +00:00Commented May 29, 2022 at 18:45