Ubuntu and Multimedia (audio, in particular)

[Michael Richter]

On 12/01/06, crimsun at fungus.sh.nu <crimsun at fungus.sh.nu> wrote:
>> OK, /proc/asound/cards now lists the cards in my preferred order. 
That's good.

> I presume sound works as intended, too?

Not really, no.  Now I have no sound.  But I haven't been able to
reboot yet.  I suspect it will work fine after I reboot.

> > 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)?

Simple mixer control 'Master',0
  Capabilities: pvolume pswitch pswitch-joined
  Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
  Limits: Playback 0 - 255
  Front Left: Playback 206 [81%] [on]
  Front Right: Playback 206 [81%] [on]
Simple mixer control 'Line',0
  Capabilities: pvolume cvolume pswitch pswitch-joined cswitch cswitch-joined
  Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
  Capture channels: Front Left - Front Right
  Limits: Playback 0 - 255 Capture 0 - 128
  Front Left: Playback 201 [79%] [off] Capture 0 [0%] [off]
  Front Right: Playback 201 [79%] [off] Capture 0 [0%] [off]
Simple mixer control 'Mic',0
  Capabilities: pvolume pvolume-joined cvolume pswitch pswitch-joined
cswitch cswitch-joined
  Playback channels: Mono
  Capture channels: Mono
  Limits: Playback 0 - 255 Capture 0 - 128
  Mono: Playback 183 [72%] [off] Capture 99 [77%] [off]
Simple mixer control 'Mic Boost',0
  Capabilities: pswitch pswitch-joined
  Playback channels: Mono
  Mono: Playback [on]
Simple mixer control 'Capture Input Source',0
  Capabilities:
  Mono:
Simple mixer control 'Digital In',0
  Capabilities: pswitch pswitch-joined
  Playback channels: Mono
  Mono: Playback [off]

> 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.

I don't see anything in there that looks right.  I guess it's not there.

> 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.

OK, that is what I think I was referring to.  But how do I make Totem
use it instead of choking on AC3?