[rescue] Multiple sound devices?

[Greg]

> SO I'm looking at an isdn/sound card and an old ss10 speaker. 
> I'm about to take apart my u1 and attach a tgx and a second 
> monitor, and I suddenly wonder if I can convice the machine
> to pipe system sounds through this speaker and use my normal
> (sweet) sound system on the box to play mp3/cd...
> 
> Is this doable? I cna't find any info.

Yes, you can have a *bunch* of batphone cards in an SBus machine. Once I had
5 or so in an SS10 (with the help of an XBox SBus expansion chassis) plus
the on-board DBRI, all playing the same CD-quality audio file at the same
time.  They weren't in synch, it sounded awful.

You'll end up with /dev/sound/0 (the default because that's what the
/dev/audio symlink points to) and /dev/sound/1.  Most well-written apps
honor the AUDIODEV environment variable, others have other means of specifying
the audio device. You can always remove /dev/audio{,ctl} and relink it to
/dev/sound/1{,ctl} to make the SpeakerBox the default audio device.  Then
use /dev/sound/0 to play the mp3/cd audio.  As long as /dev/audio points
to a valid audio device a reconfigure boot shouldn't "fix" it for you
(if it does then that's a bug, let me know and I'll see if it can be
taken care of).

[Why was this question on rescue?  I'm afraid I don't understand the
charters of these lists, sunhelp seems more appropriate for this sort
of question]

-greg