ALSA in YDL 4.0.1 + 4.1

[Derick Centeno]

On Mon, 06 Nov 2006 20:01:44 -0600
Paul Higgins <higg0008 at tc.umn.edu> wrote:

> Thanks much for your help!  I use a terminal pretty much daily, but I'm 
> nowhere near fluent with it.  I would have had no idea how to do what you 
> recommended.  Your approach resulted in a fairly sizeable 
> "findalsa" file, which I moved to my /home dir (I prefer to look at text 
> files with the Kate editor when I don't need to modify them).  Anyway, 
> believe it or not, I didn't find any obvious config file anywhere, but I did 
> find a few clues.
> 
> In "findalsa", I found several references to alsactl, including a 
> manpage.  I looked up the manpage in Konqueror ("#alsactl") and found that all 
> soundcard state information is stored in /etc/asound.state.  
> Edited /etc/asound.state, and so far, so good.  On reboot, the card is coming 
> up in the proper state as expected.
> 
> By the way, this is a G3 "Snow" 900 MHz iBook; the soundcard is identified as 
> "PowerMac Snapper" in alsamixer.  Also, unlike alsamixer which can be changed 
> by a regular user, you must be root (su -) to use the alsactl command.
> 
> Hope that helps anyone having problems with getting soundcard settings to 
> "take" when rebooting.
> 
> -PRH
> 

Hi Paul:

I'm glad that my approach was useful.  However, I believe the reason you couldn't find "any obvious
config file anywhere" within file findalsa was because you may have a different view or definition
of what you believe a configuration file to be.  Please notice that if you execute the exact same
instructions for find so that it produces findalsa as it did originally you will notice at line 98
the following:

/etc/alsa/alsa.conf

This means that the file alsa.conf is located within /etc/alsa.

If you open alsa.conf with your favorite editor, within the first four lines you will see:

ALSA library configuration file

pre-load the configuration files

In other words, this one file loads all the others such as:

line 28 aliases.conf
line 11 asound.conf

In this situation, we were operating using different ideas and definitions of the same words. I
suppose this kind of thing is impossible to avoid, however I'd like to do better next time in
helping you get to an answer sooner.