TinyALSA Documentation

You can install TinyALSA using the PPA provided on Launchpad. This includes the command-line tools and the development libraries required for building applications against TinyALSA.

Available packages:

• tinyalsa: Contains tinyplay, tinycap, tinymix, and tinypcminfo.
• libtinyalsa: Contains the shared library.
• libtinyalsa-dev: Contains the static library and header files.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:taylorcholberton/tinyalsa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tinyalsa
sudo apt-get install libtinyalsa-dev

TinyALSA supports CMake, Make, Meson, and Soong (for Android). To build and install using Make, execute the following commands in your terminal:

make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

To run the TinyALSA test suite using Bazel, you must first ensure loopback devices are inserted and permissions are set.

1. Setup loopback devices:

sudo modprobe snd-aloop
sudo chmod 777 /dev/snd/*

2. Run tests: The default playback device is hw:2,0 and the default capture device is hw:2,1. If your loopback devices use different identifiers, pass them via --copt flags.

Standard test run:

bazel test //:tinyalsa_tests --test_output=all

Test run with custom loopback devices:

bazel test //:tinyalsa_tests --test_output=all \
    --copt=-DTEST_LOOPBACK_CARD=[loopback card] \
    --copt=-DTEST_LOOPBACK_PLAYBACK_DEVICE=[loopback playback device] \
    --copt=-DTEST_LOOPBACK_CAPTURE_DEVICE=[loopback capture device]

Once installed, you can access the manual pages for the command-line tools and the PCM/Mixer libraries using the man command:

• man tinyplay (Playback tool)
• man tinycap (Capture tool)
• man tinymix (Mixer tool)
• man tinypcminfo (PCM info tool)
• man libtinyalsa-pcm (PCM API documentation)
• man libtinyalsa-mixer (Mixer API documentation)