Ubuntu and Multimedia (audio, in particular)

[crimsun at fungus.sh.nu]

On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 11:37:01AM +0800, Michael Richter wrote:
[..]
> ### BEGIN set-default-soundcard
> # If the "### BEGIN..." and "### END..." comments are intact, then you
> # can change your default soundcard with "set-default-soundcard(1)."
> # Remove these comments if you want to maintain a custom configuration
> # that should not be changed automatically.
> 
> # Default soundcard
> defaults.pcm.card 1
> 
> ### END set-default-soundcard

Looks good.

> OK, /proc/asound/cards now lists the cards in my preferred order.  That's good.

I presume sound works as intended, too?

> How do I find out if the hardware supports such a toggle?  And there's
> no software mixer?  I could have sworn that, while sifting through the
> myriad of irrelevant (to me) documentation on ALSA, it mentioned some
> kind of software mixer component.  Did I misread/misremember?

What's the output from ``amixer'' (in a Terminal)? Some hardware
provide a "downmix surround to stereo" toggle. It _should_ be fairly
obvious in the output if it exists for your hardware, but concise names
haven't been the strong points of developers traditionally... If it
exists, you'd want to unmute such a switch.

The "software mixer component" to which you refer is what is more
precisely termed the alsa-lib pcm plugin "dmix" (for playback) [and has
a capture counterpart, "dsnoop," and a combined playback/capture,
"asym"], which I explained briefly. It performs the multiplexing in the
library layer.
-- 
Daniel T. Chen            crimsun at ubuntu.com
GPG key:   www.sh.nu/~crimsun/pubkey.gpg.asc
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