ALSA Default Sound Card

ALSA Default Sound Card

[Steve Holmes]

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Is there any way to tell the ALSA system to "swap cards" or at least
specify the default card for everything to use?  Now that I have both
my sound cards working, I find that I don't like the on-board all that
much but am willing to leave it available but I wanna use the SB Live
card as the default.  Right now, everything defaults to the on-board
card as card #0 and the SB Live is card #1.  I guess the easiest
concept would be to make SB Live to come up as card#0 some how.  Or
next best, have everything that runs sound including speech use card
#1 under present configuration.

Does this all make sense?

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Re: ALSA Default Sound Card

[Gregory Nowak]

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Once you install to the hd, I'm thinking the best way to make sblive
the default, would be to load it in /etc/modules, which if I'm
correct, runs before udev does its probing, and then just let udev
detect, and load up your on-board card. This way, you should have the
sblive as card0, and your on-board card as card1.

Greg


On Fri, Dec 28, 2007 at 09:05:40PM -0700, Steve Holmes wrote:
> Is there any way to tell the ALSA system to "swap cards" or at least
> specify the default card for everything to use?  Now that I have both
> my sound cards working, I find that I don't like the on-board all that
> much but am willing to leave it available but I wanna use the SB Live
> card as the default.  Right now, everything defaults to the on-board
> card as card #0 and the SB Live is card #1.  I guess the easiest
> concept would be to make SB Live to come up as card#0 some how.  Or
> next best, have everything that runs sound including speech use card
> #1 under present configuration.
> 
> Does this all make sense?
> 
> -- 
> HolmesGrown Solutions
> The best solutions for the best price!
> http://holmesgrown.ld.net/
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> 

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Re: ALSA Default Sound Card

[Kenny Hitt]

Hi.  Once you install Ubuntu to your hd, you can use an .asoundrc file to set the default card for your user account.
My file looks like:

pcm.!default {
    type hw
    card 1
}
ctl.!default {
    type hw
    card 1
}


Be aware OSS apps will still use card 0.  If you put the above in /etc/asound.conf, it will make card 1 the default system
wide for all alsa apps.  Once again, OSS apps will still use card 0 since they write to /dev/dsp and card 1 is /dev/dsp1.

Hope this helps.
          Kenny

Re: ALSA Default Sound Card

[David Csercsics]

The best way to make alsa rearrange the cards is to edit /etc/modprobe.conf or similar and put lines like this in it.

options snd cards_limit=2
options snd-emu10k1 index=0
options snd-hda-intel index=1

Note that for Debian and possibly others you want to put those at the
end of /etc/modprobe.d/alsabase. In case those options aren't clear here
is what it does. The options snd... line tells the alsa core module that
you have 2 soundcards. The default is undefined I think since it has to
autoprobe. The other 2 lines with index= put the emu10k1 chip at 0 which
is the first soundcard and the hda-intel module gets assigned index 1
so it's the second card. This way udev can happily load your modules. Note
that although the first line with the cards_limit parameter is not
strictly required some distributions (Debian for example) will have a
line earlier in the modprobe configuration that makes it default to 1
card which means that you don't get any sound at all when you try to
have both enabled and it really screws things up. Hopefully this helps.

Re: ALSA Default Sound Card

[Steve Holmes]

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Yes, it does.  Thanks a bunch.  I first ran into some of the below
suggestions while googling this subject earlier this evening.  I got
that to work.  In my Slackware setup, I didn't have a cards_limit deal
in there but I might as well go out and add it for further reference
or clarity.  I also tried blacklisting the unwanted card and that
trick also worked; sure quicker than removing that card's definition
in the kernel compile config.  Now I have access to both cards.  I
might also consider using speech on the onboard card and let the SB
Live card do the rest of the stuff.  Of course this way, I now have
all things go through the Live card and I can use headphones to access
everything at once.  But this way with both cards functioning at the
same time, I have even more flexibility.

It's funny but your example represents the exact same two cards in my
box as well.  The HDA card sounds good for playback but the recording
was extremely weak and there's no base/trevel controls either.  My SB
Live card has all that and the recording levels are much better.

Thanks again for the help and follow-up to what I began to find out
this evening.  Just shows you how powerful and flexibil Linux is once
you figure things out.

On Sat, Dec 29, 2007 at 04:44:16PM -0800, David Csercsics wrote:
> The best way to make alsa rearrange the cards is to edit /etc/modprobe.conf or similar and put lines like this in it.
> 
> options snd cards_limit=2
> options snd-emu10k1 index=0
> options snd-hda-intel index=1
> 
> Note that for Debian and possibly others you want to put those at the
> end of /etc/modprobe.d/alsabase. In case those options aren't clear here
> is what it does. The options snd... line tells the alsa core module that
> you have 2 soundcards. The default is undefined I think since it has to
> autoprobe. The other 2 lines with index= put the emu10k1 chip at 0 which
> is the first soundcard and the hda-intel module gets assigned index 1
> so it's the second card. This way udev can happily load your modules. Note
> that although the first line with the cards_limit parameter is not
> strictly required some distributions (Debian for example) will have a
> line earlier in the modprobe configuration that makes it default to 1
> card which means that you don't get any sound at all when you try to
> have both enabled and it really screws things up. Hopefully this helps.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup

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