Bug#979180: ALSA now working

[ael]

On Wed, Feb 16, 2022 at 07:31:08PM -0500, Frédéric Brière wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 07, 2021 at 11:07:34PM +0000, ael wrote:
> > A quick-and-dirty patch is to change "plughw:0,0" to  "default:" in
> > audio_device.cpp:-
> > 
> > No doubt that can be done from the twinkle gui as well, but I have not
> > explored that as well.
> 
> Wow!  You seem to have gone through a LOT of hardships to avoid spending
> 30 seconds in the GUI...
> 
> This can be configured under Edit > System Settings > Audio.
> 
> For each role (Ring tone, Speaker and Microphone), you will be able to
> pick among the list of all normal (plughw) ALSA devices, including
> `default` (which is, indeed, the default).  You can also use any other
> non-listed device using the "Other device" entry right below.
> 
> No compilation necessary.  :)
Indeed, but you assume that everyone fully understands the significance
of all the ALSA devices.

I am now something of an expert on ALSA, and understand how this all fits
together. But that wasn't obvious to me when I hit the problem.
ALSA is notorious for poor end user documentation.

I am now subscribed to the alsa-devel at alsa-project.org mailing list
and so am aware of the huge amount of active work on ALSA. So I
know that the ALSA maintainers are extremely busy dealing with some
intricate problems including handling concurrency properly in an
inadequate language. So while there is some reasonable developer 
documentation, there is very little current documentation for the end
user (or even for the entry-level developer).

I started to try to write some basic documentation myself, but it is
a big task and the target is fast moving. I haven't had enough time
recently to continue with that, but hope to make something available 
eventually.