Have you considered putting a sleep instruction here when you're polling the state to prevent the CPU from running at 100% when the pulse audio demon is responding a bit slowly?

I'm also reaching out to let you know that I'm working on a similar topic, only as a static library: https://github.com/beaumanvienna/pamanager
I thought there aren't many good recourses on C++ solutions about how to deal with libpulse and also found your project way too late. I put a link to pamixer in the readme :-) If you have the time to look over it, please let me know any feedback. Thanks!

Since the README says that pamixer can be used as a library, I find it rather strange that the callback functions are declared in pulseaudio.hh but defined in pamixer.cc. Are they not general enough to be part of the lib?

Hello when I use pamixer on my desktop I am not able to change the volume of my headphones plugged into the front panel audio ports. Pulseaudio works and I can hear videos from youtube but I cannot change the volume. When I run pamixer --list-sinks the only thing that shows up is the audio for my HDMI monitor. Sometimes the front panel ports are listed and I can change volume but most of the time they are not there.
I am using an Artix Linux(Arch based with runit instead of systemd) and have the latest version from the arch repos

The --get-volume and --get-volume-human switches return 0 only if volume is not 0 and not muted. If they are it exits with 1 (while still returning the string to stdout).

libboost_program_options.so is a huge dependency – 448 kiB just for parsing CLI option.

There appears no option to set the default sink?!

I've tried pamixer --default-sink, but it segfaulted:

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'boost::exception_detail::clone_impl<boost::exception_detail::error_info_injector<boost::program_options::unknown_option> >'
  what():  unrecognised option '--default-sink'
[1]    21268 abort (core dumped)  ./pamixer --default-sink 6

See title.
Excellent app, btw.

Edit: Oops. I meant command line options, not man page. Sorry.

Please release a new version, for example 1.1.1, so that we can get proper error reports instead of core dumps. Apart from this, thank you very much for a nice and useful utility.

After opening pamixer and using normally, I receive an error on exit, after pressing q

> pamix
Assertion 'pthread_mutex_destroy(&m->mutex) == 0' failed at ../pulseaudio/src/pulsecore/mutex-posix.c:83, function pa_mutex_free(). Aborting.
Aborted (core dumped)

This occurs even if I close right after I open it. Sometimes, the volume drops to 10%.

pamixer can adjust sinks and sources volumes, but not application volumes.

@cdemoulins, can you please release (tag) a new version?

Does it work with Pipewire ???

when i try to compile in debian wheezy:

% make

g++ --std=c++11 -Wall -Werror -Wextra -pedantic -c -o pulseaudio.o pulseaudio.cc
pulseaudio.cc: In member function ‘void Pulseaudio::set_volume(Device&, pa_volume_t)’:
pulseaudio.cc:140:22: error: ‘UINT32_MAX’ was not declared in this scope
make: *** [pulseaudio.o] Error 1

these are the specific lines:
140 if (new_volume > PA_VOLUME_MAX) {
141 new_volume = PA_VOLUME_MAX;
142 }

if i comment out these lines, compilation works fine

I'm not sure whether this makes sense to add into pamixer given it's not running in a daemon mode. But looking at how pavucontrol has added a sound when you change a devices volume makes me think adding this to pamixer might not be as hard since the underlying code already exists.

pulseaudio/pavucontrol@8a11d0f#diff-49473dca262eeab3b4a43002adb08b4db31020d190caaad1594b47f1d5daa810L40-L42

is the latest commit that touches that code and might give some insight in how this is implemented.

Basically it uses libcanberra CA_PROP_EVENT_ID to play audio-volume-change which uses the systems installed Freedesktop sound-theme files.

Though in pavucontrol it replaces currently playing audio-volume-change sound whenever a new volume change event is incoming, I'm not sure how well this would work with pamixer - so I guess I might just end up writing a daemon-wrapper around pamixer to allow such functionality.

Time being I'm just using canberra-gtk-play --id=audio-volume-change in my pamixer wrapper.

Hi, Thanks for pamixer(1).

I've three or so different configurations of settings which I keep switching between, e.g. videoconferencing v. listening to music. It would be nice to set PulseAudio up as required and then pamixer --print or similar and have it write to stdout an invocation of pamixer which will restore the settings it can control. It's then up to the user where or how he stores these for later use. pamixer doesn't need to start understanding configuration-file formats, or user profiles, and selecting between them.

README.rst lists:
"Dependencies
libpulse
boost-program_options"

I already had libpulse0, and after I installed libboost-program-options1.71.0, I thought all would be good.
No.

Eventually, I found I had to install libpulse-dev and libboost-program-options1.71-dev .

Indicating that -dev packages are required, and that the boost package was a library ("lib-") would save a bit of confusion
(at least for those of us less savvy about compilation)...

[Incidentally - I have to assume that boost really helps your software development, since to compile your 369KB program:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 scott scott 369200 Aug 3 17:54 pamixer
One needs to install 142MB of boost-related files
"After this operation, 142 MB of additional disk space will be used." , since libboost-program-options1.71-dev (3.7MB) pulls in
libboost1.71-dev (138MB) as well...
(and also libboost-program-options1.71.0 (2.6MB), which I had already installed in my attempts to make pamixer).]

Hi! First of all, thanks for pamixer, it's a great tool!

I'd like to have a --get-default-source option, that would print the name of the default source, similar to what --get-default-sink does. What do you think?

Thanks for pamixer!

Reading through the source code, I can't quite figure out what --default-source does. It seems to me that it is effectively a no-op, since the return value get_selected_device isn't used if --default-source is specified.

Archlinux x86_64, boost 1.53.0-2. I tried to compile pamixer against 1.53.0, and it was successful. But pamixer cannot do anything. Each time I give any legal parameter, an error message would occure:

pamixer --unmute
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'char const*'
[1]    17343 abort (core dumped)  pamixer --unmute

Thanks for this tool. Is it possible to allow multiple sinks (e.g. while increasing sound?) or have some option like --all-sinks?

I use pamixer in conjunction with a tiling window manager using keybinds to issue commands. My laptop has a microphone mute button that I would love to be able to trigger using this utility. Is there any chance you would add the ability to toggle source mutes in addition to sink mutes?

First of all, thanks for your work.
I tried to boost my sound with these commands, but it didn't work:

> pamixer --get-volume                                                ~
100
> pamixer --allow-boost                                               ~
> pamixer --set-volume 150                                            ~
> pamixer --get-volume                                                ~
100

Did I'm missing something?
Did I'm something wrong?

在我使用pamixer 任何操作的时候，它都在终端打印Connection error

Would it be possible ? Is it planned ?

I would like to have a command that given one input parameter ($THRESHOLD) would compare it with the current volume ($CURRENT_VOLUME), and then set the volume to the smallest value of the two ($THRESHOLD or $CURRENT_VOLUME).

Currently, I use a shell script that does this:

if [[ $CURRENT_VOLUME -gt $THRESHOLD  ]]; then
    pamixer --set-volume $THRESHOLD
fi

I'm coming from pulseaudio-ctl which had it implemented as

pulseaudio-ctl almost $THRESHOLD

I believe it could be a nice convenient addition to what pamixer can do.

Thank you very much for pamixer, it helped a lot to transition from pulseaudio to pipewire!

Prevent volume from going above 100% by default, allow it only when special option is passed (e.g. --allow-boost).

Thanks for your work it's awesome when pactl doesn't allow you to easily get the volume for example !

It could reply something like [status] percentage or just status percentage to easily parse the response in a script.

I have a script that (always) use asynchronous call to get the response, and it would be easier to get status and percentage at the same call..

I've seen that the 2 options are in the list of conflicting options, why ?

Thank's for reading

pamixer currently allows to control the default sink or any other sink specified by its index or name. There’s also option --get-default-sink that prints the default sink.

I’d like to have the same for the currently running sink(s). At least --get-running-sinks or additional column with the state of the sinks in the --list-sinks output would be beneficial.

It would be useful to be able to specify the pulseaudio server to connect to and interact with, as there are setups where you might have multiple servers (e.g. per-user).

Plain pactl exposes this as -s, --server=SERVER; with -s not already having a defined meaning, following suit could probably make sense.

1. Passing an invalid command line argument, like 'pamixer -i' (without any further arguments) should show the help page or a warning but not crash with a boost exception
2. Command line argument -s is ambiguous and matches '--sink', and '--source'

It's been a couple of years since the last release and a number of useful features have been added:

• #18
• #36
• #21

Would be nice to see these included in a 1.5 release tag, so they can be included in package repos.