How to select an alternate mixer for alternate sound device ?

[Pavel Troller]

Hi!
  I'm in a real trouble with my system containing two soundcards: I can select
an alternate sound device (for example, /dev/dsp1) but not an alternate mixer
device (/dev/mixer1). This causes that when I set for example /dev/dsp1 in
Sound Server kcm, /dev/mixer is still used by KDE and for example trying to set
the volume from noatun or other KDE program causes that incorrect mixer
(/dev/mixer) is controlled. Of course I can control the right mixer from kmix,
but it's really not comfortable :-).
  I'm considering this as a really serious bug, because it makes using more
than one soundcard really complicated. 
  I've found a wishlist item #55078 which seems to be requesting a similar
functionality, but I'm afraid that it's too late for 3.2 to implement this
(it would require an extra dialog to be able to set the mixer name manually).
  So I'm suggesting an alternate, automatically working method: to try to guess
the correct mixer device name from the output device name. For example, to
strip the common device name (/dev/dsp) from the device name string, thus
obtaining "1" in my example, and then prepending a common mixer name
(/dev/mixer), thus obtaining /dev/mixer1, which is correct. I don't know
whether it would work generally in all the cases, but it should catch the
most common ones. Of course there should be a fallback in case that the
guessed mixer device is not present, i.e. to use the default name instead.
  Would it be possible to implement this for 3.2 ? Are there any objectives
against it ? Or does anybody have a better solution which can be included
in 3.2 ?
                                           With regards, Pavel Troller