PulseAudio vs ALSA: Multiple Soundcards

Question

I'm trying to use a bunch of sundcards (8 usb + 4 hdmi + 1 mobo) to control different zones separately & combine them in cool ways.

I'm having trouble getting pulse to recognize all of my soundcards' existence.

"aplay -l" recognizes all 13 cards, as does "pacmd list-cards", but pulse only recognizes 10 of them (0-9). It seems to find them in the "pacmd dump", but not in "list-sinks."

my "pacmd info" file loads all the modules correctly, but I can't figure out why "list-sinks" doesn't list them.

Answer 1

If ALSA recognizes your sound cards then you can try to add them to PulseAudio manually with pacmd load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:x,y where x and y is the device, subevice pair of aplay -l.

If it works correctly then you can append these commands to the default configuration of PulseAudio (/etc/pulse/default.pa). (I know that it's only a hack, but it works for me :)