This package contains wrappers for accessing the ALSA api from Python. It is currently fairly complete for PCM devices, and has some support for mixers

If you find bugs in the wrappers please open an issue in the issue tracker. Please don't send bug reports regarding ALSA specifically. There are several bugs in this api, and those should be reported to the ALSA team - not me.

This software is licensed under the PSF license - the same one used by the majority of the python distribution. Basically you can use it for anything you wish (even commercial purposes). There is no warranty whatsoever.

Installation

Note: the wrappers link with the alsasound library alsa (from the alsa-lib package). Verify that this is installed by looking for /usr/lib/libasound.so before building. The libasound development files are also neccesary. On debian and derivatives, this is achieved by installing the alsalib-dev package.

Naturally you also need to use a kernel with proper ALSA support.

To install, execute the following:

  $ python setup.py build

And then as root:

  # sudo python setup.py install

Using the API

There is a reasonably useful API documentation included in the module documentation, which can be found in the doc subdirectory of the source distribution.

There are also three example programs included with the source: playbacktest.py which plays back raw sound data read from stdin

recordtest.py which captures sound from the microphone at writes it raw to stdout.

mixertest.py which can be used to manipulate the mixers.