[pulseaudio-discuss] Recording from USB devices without channel mixing

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Mon, 2016-02-29 at 17:33 +0100, Klaus Jaensch wrote:
> I'm wondering why it is the default to mix the channels.

If there's a device with channel map "front-left,front-right", and a
capture stream appears that has channel map "mono", do you wish that
pulseaudio would by default take audio only from the left channel? Why
would that be more likely what the user wants, rather than taking audio
from all channels the device has, or only from the right channel?

> I think mixing  should be done by the applications, not by the audio
> system.

Surely it's better use of resources to implement mixing once in the
audio server rather than in every single application separately? Also,
if an application wants to be in charge of mixing the audio, it can do
that. Apparently the developer of whatever recording application you're
using didn't bother with that, if it doesn't allow you to pick the
device channel you want to record from.

-- 
Tanu