A friendliness thought about asoundconf

[D. Michael McIntyre]

I just completed an upgrade to Gutsy while continuing to use my KDE session to 
do stuff.  It was ugly, but I suffered worse on a more frequent basis back 
when I was running Sid, so I'm more or less impressed.

One casualty of this process was that my soundcard order got jumbled somehow, 
even though I'm still running the kernel from Feisty at the moment, and 
nothing has changed in my QJackCtl config either.

Turned out I had to run asoundconf set-default-card Live to set things right, 
and now it seems like everything is in order.  I'm not sure why that was 
required, but it does get me thinking.

It's not that unusual for someone to have more than one soundcard these days.  
This asoundconf trick is very helpful, but I only learned about it myself in 
fairly recent memory.  I've been an ALSA user since 0.5.x and so on, but I 
still don't know what an .asoundrc is really for, and don't want to have to 
learn if I can help it.

So I finally come to the blasted point already.  What if Ubuntu Studio 
detected the presence of multiple soundcards, and asked users what to do 
about putting them in a persistant order across boot cycles.  This 
interactive script or whatever could then handle the ugly asoundconf business 
without anyone having to be aware of how it worked.

What I especially have in mind is that life has been a lot easier since I put 
my old SB Live! back in, and set it up as the default card for all the stupid 
OSS apps, like the nonfree Flash plugin.  Even having a crappy builtin 
soundcard in this role might still be helpful, since it seems getting the 
dmix plugin to work on an ice1712 is a bit of a fantasy for all but a lucky 
few.

So this script should be slanted toward encouraging people to wind up with 
that kind of configuration.  Cheap junk first up, more expensive stuff last, 
with JACK pre-configured to aim for the expensive stuff out of the box.

It seems it might be helpful for the guy who has lots of soundcards because he 
has lots of inputs too.  You want to know where what is, so you can record it 
without a lot of futzing around to find where the signal is.

-- 
D. Michael McIntyre