Hi,
What is the best source of information about device names ("front", "surround40" etc)? Is it the DeviceNames wiki page[1]? That page was slightly out of date, so I updated and expanded it (review would be welcome).
I'm looking for information specifically about capture device names. The wiki page didn't help me there, as it only listed playback device names. My problem is that I'd like to make Pulseaudio handle 4-channel webcam microphones[2], but I'm not aware of any input device names for 4-channel devices. Are there such device names? If not, what should be done?
Pulseaudio could just use "hw", but I'd prefer there to be a standard device name for 4-channel mics. AFAIK, at playback side, some surround implementations are using multiple devices on one card, and using "hw" wouldn't work in those cases, while e.g. "surround40" can use the multiple devices behind the scenes. I would guess that the same could be the case with some multichannel microphones, and therefore a logical name like "fourchannelmic" would be better than using "hw".
[1] http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/DeviceNames [2] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45813