audiolinuxpipe
How can I pipe any data to audio output? For example, i want to listen to a file — an archive, a drive backup, a program. Or I want to listen to my HDD — I vaguely remember reading something about this being possible about 7 years ago, but can't find anything now.
So, files, disk reads, even network connections — I want to be able to listen to anything. I know that it's definitely possible with Linux. How can I do it? Using Lubuntu 20.04
Generally you can't really refresh the whole disk without reading/writing all of it. fsck is unlikely to provide what you need - it works with the file system not the underlying device hence it mostly just scans file system meta data (inodes and other file system structures).
badblocks -n might be an option to dd if=X of=X. In any case you probably want to use large blocks to speed things up (for dd something like bs=16M, for badblocks this would read -b 16777216, or -b $((1<<24)) in reasonable shells). You'll probably also want to use conv=fsync with dd.
As for the safety of dd with the same input and output device - it reads block from input and writes it to output, so it should be safe (I have re-encrypted an encrypted partition like this on several occasions, by creating loop devices with the same underlying device and different passwords and then dd'ing from one to the other) - at least for some types of physical media: for example with shingled drives it is definitely not obvious to me, that it is 100% failure-proof.
I think you can do this with PulseAudio. I found this tutorial that shows how, titled: Redirect Audio Out to Mic In (Linux).
Run the application pavucontrol.
Go to the "Input Devices" tab, and select "Show: Monitors" from the bottom of the window. If your computer is currently playing audio, you should see a bar showing the volume of the output:
Now start an application that can record audio such as audacity and record audio (red point icon in audacity).
In pavucontrol (Volume Control) change to the Recording tab.
Click the input device button ("ALSA Capture from") and pick "Monitor of Internal Audio Analog Stereo")
Best Answer
I find piping things into
aplayworks well.journalctl | aplaydoesn't sound pretty but does work surprisingly well.Here's an example from
aplay(1):It can be found as part of the
alsa-utilspackage on debian/ubuntu.Here's a 1-liner that I like which echos a small C program into gcc, and runs the compiled version, piping it to aplay. The result is a surprisingly nice 15-minute repeating song.