I have a soundblaster as card0 and a Delta44 as card1. I want to keep it this way so that most trivial sounds come through the soundblaster, and leave the Delta44 open for use as a serious soundcard. Lately, I've been having trouble getting any decent sound editor to use the second card. Audacity should do it, but on my Kubuntu system, it crashes when opening or playing a file. I find this in my log: alsactl: resmgr: communication failure: Connection refused or audacity: resmgr: communication failure: No such file or directory So, unless I can get it to work, I'm stuck with other editors. It's amazing, but many of the decent looking editors will not allow any configuration of device, and always use /dev/dsp0. That sucks. Now, when they do allow me to select the second card as /dev/dsp1, I get errors about the format not being supported. This is because the Delta is really a 12 channel card without hardware for the extra channels. In properly written alsa programs, I can use hw:plughw1,0. But I haven't found any decent editor that will let me specify something like this. Now I'm wondering whether I can do something tricky in my /etc/asound.conf that would let the unaware programs use my Delta44. I look at the docs (such as they are) once in a while, but I never come up with anything valuable. Just today, I started by making a simple slave: pcm.delta { type hw card 1 device 0 } pcm_slave.sltest { pcm delta } pcm.live { type hw card 0 device 0 } But aplay will not use -D sltest: ALSA lib pcm.c:2090:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM sltest aplay: main:547: audio open error: No such file or directory I don't know how to go about getting a better understanding of this most arcane config file. Thanks, Tobiah