The ALSA sound system is really sophisticated, but also very
mortal-unfriendly. Doing a trivial task such as setting the default soundcard
seems to be beyond me. While Ubuntu
doesn’t ship alsaconf for some reason, I wasn’t able to find out how it does
its autoconfiguration magic during installation. Having two soundcards isn’t
uncommon. I hapen to have the setup at two boxes actually. The onboard
soundcards are usually so crappy that one wants to install a proper PCI
board. Of course in both cases, ubuntu prefers the wrong board.

After a bit of research I fished out a config file that allows to set the
prefered soundcard. Unable to parse and understand the config file I wasn’t so
lucky to make this work for legacy applications using OSS. Those seem to keep
on using the other soundcard. The config file, which goes either to
~/.asoundrc or globally to /etc/asound.conf,
currently looks like this:

Reading the alsa documentation is like trying to speak japanese for me, if
anyone knew how to fix the oss output for me, I’d be greatful.

Update: After reading this bit, I tried adding the remap to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base and restarting alsa, but without any success.

Update 2: Success! Adding explicit index attribute
to the sound card module seems to finally do the trick. Thanks Aleksander.

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