[pulseaudio-discuss] Missing second HDA playback device

[Lennart Poettering]

On Sun, 18.01.09 11:21, Jon Smirl (jonsmirl at gmail.com) wrote:

> > Currently ALSA exports no way to find out what ways to access the
> > audio devices are exclusive and what ways are not. Also it is
> > generally not defined what an ALSA "subdevice" actually refers to. In
> > your case #0 and #1 are each independant PCMs as it
> 
> If HAL/ALSA create two sink devices couldn't you make both of theses
> sinks visible in pulse and then let me manually pick the one I want?
> The confusing point here is that I had to manually create sink 1 in
> pulse.

The thing is that on some cards when we open all subdevices as
playback we will break recording, surround sound, and so on.

What I tried to explain is that there is no waqy to find out what an
ALSA subdevice means. Simply opening them all in some random order
will make them unavailable for other stuff. 

If I simply open all subdevices they way you suggest then the folks
who care for recording or care for surround with different sound cards
might be pissed off. 

> What criteria did pulse use for suppressing this device? Did it check
> if it was SPDIF and then suppress it on that basis?

We do not open *any* subdevices. We only open the main device with one
of of the analog device strings (i.e. front:, surround40:) and then
leave it up to alsa how it decides to map this to the subdevices.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
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