[linux-audio-user] aplay, plughw, alsamixer question

[Mark Knecht]

On Sat, 2003-07-26 at 10:34, fpirrone wrote:

> Mark,
> 
> I absolutely cannot force a play out one channel.  Again, using -c 1 
> which the manpage suggests is channel #, or  to quote: "number of 
> channels."  I played both a mono .wav and an .au file and they came out 
> of both channels.  Stereo plays out both channels with the 
> psychoacoustic image of spatiality.

Frank,
   This is interesting data. Thanks for checking things out. And I most
certainly remember talking before, but I did not remember anything about
your specific hardware! ;)

   I read the man page for the -c option a bit differently. I thought it
was saying how many channels I wanted the file to be played or recorded
on, and not what channel number I wanted the file played on. To me this
would make more sense for the arecord command, where you could tell it
to record 1 channel only, but again the problem is 'which channel'?

> 
> Hardware here is an onboard cs4236 chip (also MidiMan 2x2 outboard USB) 
> with the latest CCRMA updates to RedHat 8.0 SMB workstation running 
> FluxBox (we've talked before), and everything seems to work as expected.
> 
> So, what's going on here?  Is this a default behavior with mono files? 
> Is this a bug?  Why can't a signal be forced to one channel?

Seems to be one or the other. Even under Windows Media Player a mono
file plays from both speakers, so Alsa doing the same thing is not a
real suprise I suppose, but I agree that I should at least have an
option to play it in mono, and also, since we are all using hardware
capable of more than stereo, I'd certainly like an option to choose what
channel/channels aplay sends audio to.

Where does one send enhancement requests for aplay/arecord?

Thanks much for your help! I see Clemens has also responded today with
some interesting info.

Mark

> 
> Frank
>