On Mon, 2009-03-16 at 12:10 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
For the PulseAudio guys this is complicated by the fact that the
potential set of available channels from ALSA is hideously complicated,
and it's not at all easy to know which ones are useful to expose to the
user for any given card. And the PA guys really, really don't just want
to expose the whole bundle of channels for each card through the PA
configuration interface somehow, because making people figure out which
of 16 channels they need to poke to make their sound do what they want
it to is horrible.
Only 16 Channels!!! You're lucky:
http://people.redhat.com/alexl/files/why-alsa-sucks.png