> My confusion turned out to be with what exactly alsamixer
> does. ?I was getting playthrough because the "Mic" device
> was unmuted in the mixer. So alsa was doing the playthrough
> directly.
Well, because alsamixer is a tool which tries to match to all
cards supported by ALSA, it is sometimes a bit confusing.
But we do not have a better solution; ask your manufacturer to
write a GPL'ed UI-Mixer for that certain device.
> I somehow had the impression that one used alsa
> mixer to set the input levels of various devices that were
> available to be opened by software talking to alsa.
What does various devices mean in this case?
> But by
> experimenting with audacity, I see that with Mic muted in
> alsamixer, audacity is able to get input from the Mic
> device via alsa. Does this imply that ALL input devices
> should be muted in alsamixer and apps are responsible for
> reading from the input? ?For example, it seems to not
> matter whether I've muted the CD or not.. AlsaPlayer can
> still play a CD.
I guess that alsaplayer reads the CD and puts it out to PCM.
The CD channel is if you have a CD inserted and you've
pressed the play button on the drive. In this case, it
behaves like a CD player. If it is connected via an extra
cable to the mainboard, the drive will output the sound
directly to the soundcard and then adjusting the CD channel
would make sense.
Best regards
ce
