alsa-silence opens the default audio device and outputs silence. This is intended to be run in the background for bad receivers that autodetect digital input slowly. This works around the problem of slow signal detection by always forcing a signal to be present.

In particular this is for the Yamaha HTR-5250 reciever when used with an Intel hda audio card.

Building requires alsa-libs headers and libs.
Licensed under GPL2.

To build, simply type make. An executable, alsa-silence, is generated.
To see alsa-silence options, use the -h flag.

Before running this utilty you must setup your /etc/asound.conf to use dmix, see the README.

The ebuild file is for gentoo users. If you are using gentoo, you can extract this to your portage overlay. The gentoo ebuild creates an init script called /etc/init.d/alsa-silence. To make your digital audio work at startup add it to your startup with the following command:

rc-update add alsa-silence default

Downloads:

alsa-silence-1.0.tgz
alsa-silence-ebuild.tgz