Patricks is a PHP script that parses pacmd output to get the list of PulseAudio entities and allows you to control the running daemon.
Make sure you have PHP >=5.3 installed.
Place the script's files somewhere and make a symlink into your $PATH.
See 'patricks' output to get the list of available commands.
Each entity reference consists of two parts:
<entity_t> <entity-ref>
entity_t — Is the name of the entity: sink, input, source, output, card, module, client, sample.
entity-ref — Is either an index or a Name
$ patricks ls
Module#23 <module-cli-protocol-unix>
>Sink#0 <alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo>
Source#0 <alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo.monitor>
Will list all the available entities. The index comes first, the name comes in angular brackets.
Some entities do not have a name: Clients, Inputs & Outputs: you have to specify them by their index.
In order to ease the pain of distinguishing them, the 'application.name' property is displayed next to them.
Most of the literals listed in the help can be shortened. For instance,
$ patricks ls sink 0 properties
can be given as
$ patricks ls si 0 pr
unless the literal is ambiguous.
Some entities can be selected in either way: e.g. a Sink can be the 'default-sink', a Sink's Port can be the 'active port'. Such entities are prefixed with '>' in listings:
$ patricks ls si 0 po
>#0 analog-output: "Analog Output" prio=9900
#1 analog-output-headphones: "Analog Headphones" prio=9000
You can reference this entity by specifying 'this' instead of id | name. Like this:
$ patricks set sink this port next
Patricks comes with 'PulseAudio.API.php': an object-oriented API that allows you to get the fields & properties of all PulseAudio entities.
It works on top of pactl list and pactl stat, parses their output and provides access to all parsed entities.