im willing to guess these days more (especially new) users on a % basis have gnome-libs installed than the ncurses that alsaconf uses.. maybe alsa could provide some kind of uniform device-selection widget for GTK, so that there isnt a different one with different features in each app..i mean 2/3rs of them still have a txt entry box and expect you to know what hw:0,1,0 is.. something with a 'select for this app' and 'set as default' maybe.. i would say 'like how printing works'. but dont get me started on cups/foomatic/hpiod/samba/lib(gnome/kde)print etc..