Specifying the order of sound devices

[Martin Pitt]

Hi Lee,

Lee Revell [2006-04-07 14:58 -0400]:
> I was wondering what the recommended way to set the order of sound
> devices is in Ubuntu.  For example a user needs their USB headset to
> always be the first device and the onboard sound to be the second, for
> the sake of (broken) apps that can only talk to /dev/dsp.  But, if the
> machine is booted with the USB device unplugged, the onboard soundcard
> binds to /dev/dsp.  Or, a user has 3 USB audio devices and needs them to
> be bound in the same order every time.

With ALSA this is not much of a problem any more, since you can
address the devices by name. That's what the default audio card
selector now does in Dapper. That means that the order becomes largely
unimportant, apart from OSS applications, of course. A workaround for
the latter might be to use aoss.

> It seems that udev should be able to handle this but I don't see any way
> for humans to configure it ;-)  It's a real pain because every distro
> does it differently and none of them seem to have an easy way.

There is no particular 'Ubuntu way' of forcing a sound card ordering,
and udev currently does not support that, so you have to do manual
modprobe hacking to achieve that effect. However, the real bug is apps
relying on a particular sound card order in the first place.

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt        http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer   http://www.ubuntu.com
Debian Developer   http://www.debian.org

In a world without walls and fences, who needs Windows and Gates?
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