Hi,
As has been pointed out a few times, it's incorrect to use "front:" for capture, but can we have an official name/wrapper (I'm unsure of the terminology here) for this so we don't use hw: for recording?
I'd be in favour of "capture:" or "input:" as these both seem quite logical and easy to understand.
It would be used thusly:
arecord -f S16_LE -c 2 -D capture:CARD=Intel
as opposed to the incorrect: arecord -f S16_LE -c 2 -D front:CARD=Intel or the low level: arecord -f S16_LE -c 2 -D hw:CARD=Intel
Keeping it wrapped up allows for e.g. softvol or other things to be plugged in as appropriate in the config and thus future proofs things a little.
If someone could point me roughly in the right direction I'll make a patch. I suspect it'll be easy enough to cook up the relevant config needed (and I suspect it's just config rather than code that needs patched, but I could be wrong).
It would be nice to get this into a release (alsa-lib?) soon so that it can propigate and we can require it.
Cheers
Col