The Fugue

I have two soundcards in my desktop: the built-in soundcard which uses the snd-via82xx module, and the nice soundcard which uses the snd-cs46xx module. Naturally, the speakers are plugged into the nice card.

When I installed Ubuntu 8.04 from scratch, the VIA card started showing up as the first card, and therefore the default card. (You can tell by looking at /proc/asound/cards.) I created the following /etc/asound.conf to remedy that problem:

pcm.!default {
  type hw
  card CS46xx
}
ctl.!default {
  type hw
  card CS46xx
}

Ok, so now all programs using ALSA’s default device automatically go to the right soundcard. But apparently using the default device is too much to ask of some software, which apparently hardcodes hw:0 or (even nuttier) hw:0,0.

So what I really wanted was to fix the order problem, so that the VIA card doesn’t steal index 0. On Ubuntu at least, the fix is:

echo 'options snd-via82xx index=2' >> /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

Now my /proc/asound/cards always looks like this:

0 [CS46xx         ]: CS46xx - Sound Fusion CS46xx
                     Sound Fusion CS46xx at 0xfb122000/0xfb000000, irq 20
1 [UART           ]: MPU-401 UART - MPU-401 UART
                     MPU-401 UART at 0x330, irq 10
2 [V8237          ]: VIA8237 - VIA 8237
                     VIA 8237 with ALC655 at 0xec00, irq 21