> No, I don't want to play back anything: I want to *generate* a beeping
> sound. The type depends upon the occasion.

So you actually want to synthesize the beep? Is that right?

If you really do want just a beep you could synthesize the sine wave yourself pretty easily. The one and only source code example in the libao coincidentally does exactly that.

http://www.xiph.org/ao/doc/ao_example.c

> Right now I use Nas, which has good support from Jon Trulson. But that
> is meant really as a network sound server and not made for playing back
> to a particular sound card.

The libao alsa driver (alsa09), which I assume you would be using, allows you to specify which device (ie. sound card) you want to use. The oss driver will too.

> E.g. if it is 11:30 I want to produce 5 beeps for maritime chimes. If
> the dialup line goes down I want to produce 9 beeps.
>
> I would prefer to produce the beeps for a particular soundcard, for the
> user that is logged on to a monotor that uses that card.

A few lines of tweaking to that example I linked above should do exactly what you want.

CJ van den Berg

> > No, I don't want to play back anything: I want to *generate* a beeping
> > sound. The type depends upon the occasion.

I missed the original message, but how about the beep package?

andrew@basement:~$ apt-cache show beep
Package: beep
Priority: optional
Section: sound

Description: advanced pc-speaker beeper

beep does what you'd expect: it beeps. But unlike printf "\a" beep allows you to control pitch, duration, and repetitions. Its job is to live inside shell/perl scripts and allow more granularity than one has otherwise. It is controlled completely through command line options. It's not supposed to be complex, and it isn't - but it makes system monitoring (or whatever else it gets hacked into) much more informative.

Tag: interface::commandline, made-of::lang:c, role::sw:utility, works-with::audio

Andrew Sackville-West