[Alsa-user] Setting the Default Notebook Sound Card?

[Q <ra...@uk...>]

Hi I have a Toshiba Satellite A100-225 laptop and am running Kubuntu 6.10.

Anyway the thing is that my laptop has onboard sound which is an Intel 
HD Audio Chip (which I believe is based on a Realtek design). The chip 
for this card is called snd_hda_intel. However I also have an Audigy 2 
ZS PCMCIA notebook card.  The driver for this card is called snd_emu10k1.

Originally with both cards active my Intel HDA card was being loaded as 
the default card. This was relatively easy to resolve (though not as 
easy as it should be) by following these guides:

[url]http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=282175[/url]

[url]http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/sound.htm[/url]

This essentially involved entering the following code:

options snd_emu10k1 index=0
options snd_hda_intel index=1

Into these files:

/etc/modutils/options

/etc/modprobe.d/sound

In order to cause my Audigy card to be loaded first. (Which is my 
preference)

The first of these guides didn't work - however the second did - and my 
Audigy card is now listed as the default card under Kmix in KDE.

However unfortunately the *majority* (and by majority I mean all of KDE, 
all of my Media Players, the event notification system and pretty much 
everything really, is still defaulting to trying to playback via the 
onboard Intel HDA chip.

There are a couple of applications I can configure (like LastFM player) 
and tell them to explicitly use my Audigy card - and if I can do this 
the sound does play back normally and as expected.

However there are only a very few applications that will allow me to 
select my audio device in this way - and in any case, it is far from 
ideal as the ideal scenario would clearly to be able to use the Audigy 
card as my default system wide audio playback device - rather than just 
having a few applications use it, while the rest of the system uses the 
Intel chip.

There are a couple of conditions that might be wort considering in my 
attempts to get my set up to work.

Firstly I cannot simply turn the Intel chip off in my bios - as my 
laptop will not allow this. (I guess it was never envisaged that I might 
use a different sound card). Nor is this quite a solution as it does not 
resolve the ordering and default device dilemma that I am facing now. 
Secondly I cannot simply remove the module from /etc/modules so that it 
does not get loaded when I reboot - since most hardware detection is now 
done by HAL. Nor can I compile my kernel to remove the driver - as this 
has the undesirable effect of meaning that I cannot use my Intel chip at 
all. Nor would I want to do any of this - as there are several scenarios 
- where for example I may wish to remove my Audigy PCMCIA card and 
insert a TV card, or insert a PCMCIA SATA card (so that I can load an 
alternative OS) and still have sound without having to hack through 
various configuration files.

So predominantly all I want is to set my Audigy card as the default 
system wide card that all my applications will default to and my Intel 
chip as the fall back card that my system will revert to if the Audigy 
card is removed.

Can anyone suggest how I might achieve this?

I originally presumed that the above methodology would have achieved 
this, but this does not seem to have been the case. (And yes I did 
reboot after making these changes).