aplay change to use 16-bit samples by default is not backwards compatible and is not documented

[GitHub issues - opened]

alsa-project/alsa-utils issue #96 was opened from nwoeanhinnogaehr:

The change introduced in https://github.com/alsa-project/alsa-utils/commit/0c5948e98a6a8535c89b7bcab13017d7732181c6 breaks a lot of scripts and other programs I have which invoke `aplay` and expect the default sample format to be U8. While I think it's somewhat reasonable to make this change given that U8 is a rather low quality sample format, it's worth acknowledging that aplay has had this behavior for a very long time and many people probably don't expect it to change.

Given that the commit log seems to only talk about the case of `arecord`, I wonder if we could reach a compromise and keep the format as U8 for `aplay` and switch it for `arecord`, since users are unlikely to complain about poor sound quality when *playing raw audio* (surely they would take the time to get the sample format set up correctly before attempting to play raw audio).

Also, the man page has not been updated to reflect this change and still says that U8 is the default.

Issue URL     : https://github.com/alsa-project/alsa-utils/issues/96
Repository URL: https://github.com/alsa-project/alsa-utils