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A typical PC sound card has several sound inputs: the external microphone,
the external midi keyboard or other midi device, the internal cdrom/dvd
drive, the internal radio/television tuner, and the internal modem; and
multiple sound generating circuits like fm synthesis. A typical PC sound
card mixes all these inputs together and sends the output to every sound
output. The mixer amplifies each input and output seperately. A sound card
may have more than one mixer, and a computer may have more than one sound
card.

In normal use, you set the sound input which you want to use to normal
amplification, and set every other sound input to 0 amplification, and set
the sound output which you want to use to normal amplification, and set
every other sound output to 0 amplification. If you are lucky, your sound
program will do this for you. If you are really lucky, your sound program
will do this correctly.

There many possible features which sound cards may have. Every different
kind of sound card has a different combination of features. The linux sound
driver imagines a complicated sound card with a large number of features.
The alsa driver imagines more features than the oss driver. If your actual
sound card has a feature, the linux sound driver uses the feature. If your
actual sound card does not have the feature, the linux sound driver attempts
to emulate the feature. Thus a sound program does not need to know what
features your sound card actually has.

So the sound driver imagines a sound card is a large number of components
connected together, with an amplifier at each connection. If you run a
program like aumix or alsamixer, you can adjust any of those amplifiers. The
problem is that aumix and alsamixer refer to these amplifiers with cryptic
incomprehensible abbreviations.

For playing *.wav files with play, 'vol' and 'pcm' in aumix should be set to
normal amplification, and everything else should be set to 0. I did this by
putting 'aumix -v80 -w80' in my startup scripts. However, I think my volume
setting of 80% is unusually high. I think most people use less amplification
than 80%. Try 50% first.

Is mixer2 the first mixer on the second sound card or the second mixer on
the first sound card?