fische - standalone sound visualisation
-
-D --driver driver
- Use the specified audio input driver. Presently alsa, pulse,
portaudio and dummy are supported.
-d --device device
- device names the pcm capture device to get the sound data from. On
most systems, the default will do just fine. This Option is ignored with
the PulseAudio driver. The PortAudio driver knows the special device
help, which will spit out a list of all known devices.
-g --geometry XxY
- X and Y specify the width and height of the animation.
Defaults to 800x400.
-v --virtual XxY
- X and Y specify the width and height of the application
window. Use this to prevent your computer from trying to switch to
non-existent fullscreen resolutions. CAUTION: when specifying a virtual
geometry, set the actual geometry FIRST!
-f --fullscreen
- Start fische in fullscreen mode.
-e --extra-nervous
- Start fische in nervous mode.
-s --fps fps
- fps specifies the target frames per second. The default, 30, is
what fische is designed for
-1 --single
- Use only one CPU, even if there are more available
--exit-on-mouseevent
- Exit when a mouse button is clicked (useful mainly on touchscreens)
-n --nowrite
- Do not update the configuration file with the last known working
configuration.
-h --help
- Display a basic help message.
At runtime, press P to pause, F to toggle fullscreen
mode, N to toggle nervosity and ESC to quit. With the
--exit-on-mouseevent flag, fische does exactly that.
PortAudio is currently slow on Linux. If able, use a different
driver.
On Windows, the actual frame rate is often quite different from
the specified one. The actual rate is shown after exit. Use the -s flag to
increase it to about 30.
If you get an error like "X Error of failed request:
BadValue..."
- Try to start fische with the -v or --virtual flags and set X/Y to values
that correspond to a fullscreen resolution that you know exists. For
example: fische -g 1400x700 -v 1400x1050
If fische starts, but won't react to sound
- First of all, try a different input driver. If you are lucky, this
already solves your problem.
- If not, you now have to choose which driver you would like to get
working:
- pulse: Fische opens the default source as set with pavucontrol or
similar tools. For example, if you would like to visualize "what's
playing", set the corresponding "monitor of output XYZ"
device as default.
- alsa: You might be using the wrong ALSA device. By default, fische
tries to open the "default" device. It should be correctly
configured on most systems, but with some soundcards you need complex ALSA
configuration to achieve recording capabilities - look into the ALSA
documentation. For example, soundcards with ICE1712 chips record
internally produced sound on channels 10 and 11 instead of 0 and 1.
- alsa: Recording might not be enabled. Check with
"alsamixer" or an other mixer application. If you are trying to
visualize sounds produced by an audio player, you must enable recording of
what's called "PCM" on most cards. For external input, record
"Line In", and so on...
- alsa: Your sound card might not support recording of your chosen
source. In this case, you are in bad luck. Most notably, many C-Media
based cards do not allow recording while SPDIF out is in use. You can try
a setup using an "aloop" dummy card - but that process is far
beyond the scope of this man page, and with most distributions, it
requires kernel or ALSA re-compilation. However, in this case the
PulseAudio input driver might still give you the desired
results.
$HOME/.fischerc - automatically updated on clean exit.
Runtime control documentation, troubleshooting information and
FAQs in the README
This manual page was written by Marcel Ebmer fische@26elf.at.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under
the terms of the GNU General Public License, Version 2, or any later version
published by the Free Software Foundation