'Twas brillig, and Raymond Yau at 23/06/10 02:15 did gyre and gimble:
why PA server still insist to open front device for capturing ?
Couldn't tell you. Perhaps Lennart is unaware that it is considered invalid? I'll ask him.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.alsa.devel/67912/focus=68248
As Takashi had already mention that
"I agree that the capture from "front" PCM isn't considered as valid. The "front", "rear", "center_lfe" definitions are rather for multi-channel playbacks. The capture on these channels aren't useful in most cases."
you can perform an experiement
pcm.test { type softvol slave.pcm "hw:0,0" control { name "PA Playback Volume" card 0 }
arecord -D test -f CD -d 10 -v test.wav
you will find "PA Playback Volume" in playback screen of alsamixer
I am not sure the softvol control created when PA open front device for playback and capture is used for playback or capture
BTW , PA still using "front" to open CTL device too
You'll have to ask Lennart directly about that bit.
I can't speak for him with regards to the full setup of the mixer path probing stuff, so perhaps "front" should be edited out of this for paths. It would likely be a fairly trivial change to configuration files rather than any code changes.
Col