/dev/dsp

[Jonathan Hudson]

On Sat, 22 Dec 2007 21:35:32 -0400
Murry Brown <murraybr at nbnet.nb.ca> wrote:

> To John, yes I need both cards.
> 
> Jonathan.
> I tried your suggestion but I don't really know what I am looking for in the file to see what the load order is.
> Seems to me there is a command I can type in terminal to see what I am using, but don't remember what it is.
> I also checked the link you sent and tried that suggestion, but when I do that I can't access any sound card, the little speaker in the taskbar has an X through it.
> Murry
> 
> 
> 
> Jonathan Hudson wrote:On Sat, 22 Dec 2007 17:04:06 -0400
> Murry

Murray,

Please (a) don't top post and (b) turn off HTML. 

So what you need to to 

* Revert the changes to alsa-base;

Then, find out what sound card modules you have, you can do this as a
normal user, in a terminal, type:

lsmod | grep snd_

You'll get a whole load if stuff like:

snd_usb_audio          96640  1 
snd_usb_lib            20352  1 snd_usb_audio
snd_hwdep              12168  1 snd_usb_audio
snd_seq_dummy           5380  0 
snd_seq_oss            36864  0 
snd_intel8x0           40104  0 
snd_seq_midi           11008  0 
snd_ac97_codec        122200  1 snd_intel8x0
snd_rawmidi            29824  2 snd_usb_lib,snd_seq_midi
snd_seq_midi_event      9984  2 snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_midi
ac97_bus                4096  1 snd_ac97_codec
....

Identifying which are the modules you want for the devices may take a
bit of googling, but  snd_intel8x0 and snd-ens1370 or snd-ens1371 may
be a start.

In my example, I have a USB and AC97 (snd_usb_audio, snd_intel8x0), and
I want the USB device, [surround stuff for the wife's DVDs] to be
always index 0, and the AC97 [headset for VOIP] to be index 1, so in 

/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

I have two extra lines:

options snd_intel8x0 index=1
options snd_usb_audio index=0

-jh