I've been using alsa for a while now, and it mostly works fine. However, I'm continually perplexed by the array of mixer options, and the fact that every mixer program seems to access them differently.
The card I have is a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, by the way, with a cs46xx chip. If I load up alsamixer, I get the following entries: Master Master Mono Master 1 Headphone 3D Control - Center 3D Control - Center 1 3D Control - Depth 3D Control - Depth 1 3D Control - Switch 3D Control - Switch 1 PCM PCM Out Path & Mute 1 PCM 1 Surround 1 Center 1 LFE 1 Line Line 1 CD CD 1 Mic Mic Boost (+20dB) Mic Boost (+20dB) 1 Mic Select Mic 1 Video Video 1 Phone Phone 1 IEC958 IEC958 Input IEC958 Output PC Speaker Aux Aux 1 Mono Output Select Capture Capture 1 Mix Mix Mono Mix 1 Mix Mono 1 ADC DAC External Amplifier Power Down That's a lot of entries. Some are obvious - master, PCM, Line, CD, Mic, etc.. all do just what they should. But why are there two of almost everything? (the ones with '1' after their name) And what's are the Master Mono and Headphone settings for? They don't seem to do anything at all! The 3D options seem to have a minute effect on wavs that are playing, but it would be nice to know what the options actually do, along with PCM Out Path (the options are Pre 3D and Post 3D). All the Mix values seem to do nothing as well. Finally, the options for muting and setting as recordable are quite odd: Some channels just can't be muted for some reason: Video 1 and Phone 1 are always on, though Video and Phone can be toggled. I can select one from the normal series of inputs, and one from the series with '1' after the name - i.e. I can pick CD and Line 1, but nod CD 1 and Line 1. Many of the others have toggles there - Capture, ADC, and DAC are on or off, but won't affect the others that might be selected. One last thing - alsamixer, alsamixergui and the mixer in snd-alsa all seem to have different capabilities somewhat.. snd doesn't have nearly all the options, and labels some of them differently (it took me forever to find that "input gain" in snd was "capture" in alsamixer!), and the "Select" options (Mono Output Select and Mic Select) don't seem to me adjustable at all in alsamixergui, just the console version. It's all rather confusing to me. Is any of this documented anywhere? If not, it really should be! -- Jon-o Addleman Curious about the PGP attachments in my e-mail? see http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/scotmid/pgpweb/pgpintro.shtml to find out why they're there!
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