two sound cards, keeping their HW number

[D. Michael McIntyre]

On Saturday 13 October 2007, Luke Yelavich wrote:
> A better solution is to set the sound card you want as the default, and
> yes, there is a way of doing this without having to force a card to a
> perticular address.
[...]
> asoundconf set-default-card M66

OK, I've finally had a chance to see if this worked, and it didn't.  The last 
two times I rebooted, I had to switch QJackCtl by hand to the other card.  I 
just verified that my asoundrc stuff looks right:

# ALSA library configuration file managed by asoundconf(1).
#
# MANUAL CHANGES TO THIS FILE WILL BE OVERWRITTEN!
#
# Manual changes to the ALSA library configuration should be implemented
# by editing the ~/.asoundrc file, not by editing this file.
!defaults.pcm.card Live
defaults.ctl.card Live
defaults.pcm.device 0
[...]

But this doesn't seem to have any effect on anything.  QJackCtl still sees my 
ice1712 as card 0 this time around (it was card 2 last time) so I've been 
using my emu10k1 for playback all this time without realizing it.  I have the 
two cards synced through SPDIF, and all the audio ultimately comes out of the 
ice1712.  It doesn't seem to matter which card is which for day to day 
playing around (probably says something about how my ears aren't very 
sensitive), but the difference becomes critical at recording time.

That's the real bother here.  I wanted to play with recording, and I noticed 
the only signals in Envy24Control were coming from SPDIF IN.  Then I expanded 
the alsa_pcm entry in QJackCtl, and lo, I only had two inputs and two 
outputs.  Must be using the wrong card.  AGAIN.

Unless there is a more sure recipe than this asoundconf thing (like being able 
to force the hw:x order at every boot) I guess I have no remedy other than to 
try to remember to look at QJackCtl each time and see which hw is which.  (In 
addition to these two, I have a USB MIDI dongle that takes a card slot, even 
though it doesn't produce audio.  That one always seems to come up card 1, 
and it's just 0 and 2 that keep flipping randomly.)

Or maybe I'm just stupid, and somebody needs to take a deep breath and start 
at page 1.  Or better yet, suggest a way to hack this stupid thing so that I 
always know which is card 0, and which is card 2.

(And hey, on the bright side, now that I have shut everything down, changed 
QJackCtl, and started it all back up, I have got my old mAudio AudioBuddy 
working backwards as a headphone amp monitoring the analog outs on my 
Audiophile 2496, and so I finally have the ability to monitor something other 
than my Sound Canvas on headphones.  This is something I haven't been able to 
do since my old amp blew up; the one that had a handy headphone jack on it.  
So now I can do live audio recordings over top of other live audio recordings 
like hasn't been possible in years.  Joy!)

-- 
D. Michael McIntyre