Beyond that I
can't help you much. SB cards are an absolute nightmare.
Perhaps somebody else on this list who has a SB card can offer more
help. The Alsa Wiki can sometimes help.
This is a well known problem. The emu10k1 needs an hwdep mixer app,
like on Windows. It's just too complex for a generic mixer API.
We get a lot of complaints about the mixer but not a lot of suggestions
to improve it. A good way to start it to open an ALSA bug report like
"emu10k1: mixer sux0r" and suggest how we could improve it.
The Sound Blaster / Audigy, AC97, and Nvidia related cards or chips are becomming a real
pain in the ass. Something needs to be done to make the configuration of these idiot
proof. (Not that I'm calling anybody with said hardware an idiot.) I try to help out
people on the Gentoo Multimedia forums and there must be several posts a day reading
something like "I can't get this POS audio device to work with Alsa".
Since most of the noobs to linux are comming from a windows background, wouldn't it
help if the mixer app was modeled after the mixer app used for these cards / chips on
windows? i.e. no learning curve. (maybe it already is, I've tried to stay away from
them)
-Reuben