The 2008 audio guide recommends http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/guide-to-sound-apis.html "Do not use the snd_card_xxx() APIs. For enumerating use snd_device_name_hint() (and related functions). snd_card_xxx() is obsolete... Bluetooth audio are not included"
Is that correct advice?
Wine still uses snd_card, so it knows only about "default" and "plughw:x,y". I believe that's wrong but don't know what should be used instead in order not to come up with a long list of artificial names mentioned in /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf such as surround51 when the poor on-board card knows nothing but 16 bit stereo.
I'm looking for a list of working devices on this machine, which likely should contain "default" (usually leading to PA on a recent Ubuntu machine), "plug:dmix" (PA getting out of the way when trying to use other devices), "hw:0,0" and presumably not much more.
Bump, still hoping for an answer to this.
I tried experimenting with snd_device_name_hint(). It gave me what looked like a promising list, consisting of:
null front:CARD=SB,DEV=0 surround40:CARD=SB,DEV=0 surround41:CARD=SB,DEV=0 surround50:CARD=SB,DEV=0 surround51:CARD=SB,DEV=0 surround71:CARD=SB,DEV=0 iec958:CARD=SB,DEV=0
This is identical to the list from "aplay -L".
But, passing these to aplay fails if I have PulseAudio running ("device in use"). If I kill PA, then they don't fail, but give warnings about rate conversion and suggest the plug plugin. So I stick "plug:" in front of the device name, and they fail again ("unknown parameter front:CARD"). Clearly I'm doing something very wrong. But I don't know what!
Then it occurred to me that this list also contains neither "default" nor the "pulse" device in my asound.conf[1]. Both of these work when passed to aplay.
Looking to other projects for help, I find that VLC uses the snd_card_ functions, just like Wine currently does. Of course, that fails to find the "pulse" device from asound.conf. And mplayer's libao2 uses a couple of hard-coded device names, which is even worse (right?).
So I'm really stuck here. Where am I supposed to get a list of devices that I can present to the user, including their Bluetooth devices and virtual devices from asound.conf?
[1] asound.conf from Arch Linux pulseaudio-alsa package: http://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/asound.conf?h...
Andrew