Re: [gentoo-user] udev 103, alsa dual soundcard problem

[Hans de Hartog]

Dave Jones wrote:
> Yesterday I upgraded udev to 103, but have hit some problems with alsa
> configuration of multiple sound cards.
>
> I have an 'on board' Intel 8x0 sound card which I use for VoIP
> telephony, and a PCI Creative Audigy which I use to play music.
>
> The Audigy is configured to alsa as sound card 0, while the Intel card
> is sound card 1.  This set up has worked perfectly for years.
>
> The udev 103 upgrade recommends removing coldplug. However, the alsa
> initialisation script (alsasound) depend on both coldplug and hotplug.
>
> If I remove coldplug from the boot runlevel alsasound fails, leaving
> only the Intel sound card initialised.
>
> Even worse is that udev seems to discover the sound cards in the reverse
> order to coldplug.  My Audigy card becomes /dev/dsp1 and the Intel card
> is /dev/dsp0.   Unfortunately,  Audacious, my music player of choice,
> doesn't seem to offer any choice of which dsp to use.
>
> To put it mildly, this is a major pain; I don't want to listen to music
> played through the VoIP headset connected to the Intel card.
>
> Is there any way I can persuade udev to generate the /dev entries for my
> sound cards in a particular order, so that Audacious can continue to
> work with /dev/dsp0?
>
> Thanks in advance for any help or advice you may be able to give.
>
> Cheers, Dave

You can determine the order in which the cards are found by having
the driver of (what you want as) card 0 compiled into the kernel
and configure card 1 in your kernel as a module.
That's not an elegant solution but it works.
Another possibility: in most alsa-aware applications where you refer
to the card number (0 or 1) you can also refer to the name of the card.
You can find the name of the cards with "cat /proc/asound/cards"

Regards,
Hans.
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