[pulseaudio-discuss] How do I read my microphone's source levels from the cmdline?

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Sun, 2016-09-11 at 15:31 +0800, Kai Hendry wrote:
> In pavucontrol I can see the levels of my microphone;
> http://s.natalian.org/2016-09-11/levels.mp4
> 
> That reading I hope is all I need for my noise monitoring system.
> 
> How do I get values of my levels from some cli tool like pamix or pactl?
> 
> I know I could do this with gstreamer, but I find it very hairy.
> https://www.youtube.com/edit?video_id=PHKpVJ0rSRw

We don't provide ready-made tools for that. Pavucontrol captures the
audio like any other audio recording application (except it uses very
low sample rate and requests a special "peaks" resampler that inverts
negative sample values to positive). There's no "get one sample now"
feature in pulseaudio, you have to set up a recording stream in one way
or another.

-- 
Tanu