Specifying the order of sound devices

[Lee Revell]

On Mon, 2006-04-10 at 07:53 +0200, Martin Pitt wrote:
> Lee Revell [2006-04-07 14:58 -0400]:
> > I was wondering what the recommended way to set the order of sound
> > devices is in Ubuntu.  For example a user needs their USB headset to
> > always be the first device and the onboard sound to be the second, for
> > the sake of (broken) apps that can only talk to /dev/dsp.  But, if the
> > machine is booted with the USB device unplugged, the onboard soundcard
> > binds to /dev/dsp.  Or, a user has 3 USB audio devices and needs them to
> > be bound in the same order every time.
> 
> With ALSA this is not much of a problem any more, since you can
> address the devices by name. That's what the default audio card
> selector now does in Dapper. That means that the order becomes largely
> unimportant, apart from OSS applications, of course. A workaround for
> the latter might be to use aoss.
> 
> > It seems that udev should be able to handle this but I don't see any way
> > for humans to configure it ;-)  It's a real pain because every distro
> > does it differently and none of them seem to have an easy way.
> 
> There is no particular 'Ubuntu way' of forcing a sound card ordering,
> and udev currently does not support that, so you have to do manual
> modprobe hacking to achieve that effect. However, the real bug is apps
> relying on a particular sound card order in the first place.

But OSS apps and those that don't let you choose the sound device are
exactly the problem.  Many OSS apps don't work with aoss and/or don't
allow selecting the sound device (games, Skype, the Flash plugin) and
show no interest in ever updating their apps to use ALSA natively.

Also Ubuntu does not provide an aoss wrapper script for most of the OSS
apps it ships, so this option is out of reach for many users.

Lee