Today we're going to dig into ALSA, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, because I think it's the best tool for managing your Linux sound devices. It's good for managing multiple sound devices, and it works in all Linux environments including other window managers, or no X Windows at all.

You're going to need alsa-base and alsa-utils. Suppose you have a single sound card on your system; either a PCI sound card or onboard sound. This is easy. Just fire up alsamixer to configure it, as Figure 1 shows. That's for my onboard AC97-based chipset. (As always, lscpi will show you what's on your system.) alsamixer only displays supported functions. The top-left captions tell you a lot of useful information: your sound card and chipset, which set of functions you're viewing, and the values for the highlighted setting. The default view is Playback, like in Figure 1. There are three views: Playback, Capture, and All. Hit the Tab key to toggle between them.

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