Temporarily enablingdisabling a sound card in SuSE 9.3 208

On 21 Jan 2006 10:30:38 -0800, AN O'Nymous staggered into the Black Sun and said:

Damned if I know. All my machines have either 1 or 0 sound cards. Time to try it out and see, eh?

Er... why should it? I haven't been paying much attention to the lowlevel guts of sound on Linux (besides wondering what kind of crack the ALSA people were smoking wrt user config and joysticks). But it used to be that each digital signal processor had its own device file. So a sound card with 2 DSPs would havedev-dsp0 anddev-dsp1 , and if you had 2 sound cards of that type, you'd havedev-dsp0-3 . You could control each DSP individually with various mixers. The main problem was user setup for that.

Now, of course, there's only 1dev-dsp. I think there's some stuff in the guts of ALSA that takes all sound written todev-dsp and writes that data to all soundcards. Mixer data that you manipulate with amixer or alsamixer or whatever is applied to that data before it hits the card, so if you've muted card 1, no stuff appears on card 1's audio out. At least, that's what makes sense to me, so it could be *totally wrong*, but just try muting one card in the way I described and see what happens. HTH,

-- Matt GThere is no Darkness in Eternity-But only Light too dim for us to see Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong ----------------------------- penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL