Comment 22 for bug 71704

Hi isabella,

 The switches you see in playback are unlikely to be related to capture, these enable the input to be played straight through the soundcard (without the data ever even touching ALSA), so you can hear the input through your speakers whether you're attempting to record something or not. It's quite normal on many sound cards to see at least the microphone listed under both capture and playback. But I have no idea why the SB Live should be reporting the line-in only on the playback tab.

 The available devices and mixers should be presented to ALSA through the card's ALSA driver (which I think in turn queries the hardware itself, although this may not be the case).

 I may try and get my hands on a second hand SB Live in a few months so I can have a poke around, but it'd be great if you could continue looking in to the problem and save me the trouble ;).

 Cheers,
  Mike.