ALSA, multiple sound-cards and random devices
I have two sound-cards in my XPC, one ICH5 onboard solution and a Terratec Aureon 5.1 PCI card. I have both enabled using the onboard solution for my headset and the Aureon for line-in/out. ALSA seems to assign the cards randomly (depending on the sequence the modules are loaded?) which results in having my audio-player’s ouput on my headset sometimes while I actually want it on line-out of my PCI-card. The ALSA FAQ to the rescue! Adding the index parameter to the options of the appropriate module within /etc/modprobe.d/options seems to do the trick:
options snd_cmipci index=0
options snd_intel8×0 index=1