# 16.1 Built-in Module `al`

This module provides access to the audio facilities of the SGI Indy and Indigo workstations. See section 3A of the IRIX man pages for details. You'll need to read those man pages to understand what these functions do! Some of the functions are not available in IRIX releases before 4.0.5. Again, see the manual to check whether a specific function is available on your platform.

All functions and methods defined in this module are equivalent to the C functions with ``AL`' prefixed to their name.

Symbolic constants from the C header file ``<audio.h>`' are defined in the standard module `AL`, see below.

Warning: the current version of the audio library may dump core when bad argument values are passed rather than returning an error status. Unfortunately, since the precise circumstances under which this may happen are undocumented and hard to check, the Python interface can provide no protection against this kind of problems. (One example is specifying an excessive queue size -- there is no documented upper limit.)

The module defines the following functions:

`openport` (name, direction[, config])
  The name and direction arguments are strings. The optional config argument is a configuration object as returned by `al.newconfig()`. The return value is an port object; methods of port objects are described below.

`newconfig` ()
  The return value is a new configuration object; methods of configuration objects are described below.

`queryparams` (device)
  The device argument is an integer. The return value is a list of integers containing the data returned by ALqueryparams().

`getparams` (device, list)
  The device argument is an integer. The list argument is a list such as returned by `queryparams`; it is modified in place (!).

`setparams` (device, list)
  The device argument is an integer. The list argument is a list such as returned by `al.queryparams`.

- 16.1.1 Configuration Objects
- 16.1.2 Port Objects