Comment 4 for bug 48377

(Dropping Importance. Sorry, but a usability bug, while extremely annoying, does not constitute an Importance of the extremity of a system crash.)

If System> Preferences> Sound> Default sound card's drop-down menu is not working properly, that's a bug in the gnome-control-center source package.

alsa-utils in Dapper includes the asoundconf(1) utility that gnome-control-center's Sound applet invokes to perform the background task. If you find using asoundconf(1) [see the set-default-card convenience macro] remains utterly ineffectual, then you can forcibly set one driver to /not/ be the default (i.e., not grab index 0).

Let's take the example of my computer, which uses the snd_intel8x0 and snd_usb_audio drivers. (While asoundconf(1) works for me, for the purposes of this illustration I'll pretend it doesn't work.) Let's say that I really want my onboard sound chipset to be the secondary instead of the primary, since my M-Audio Transit USB is a "much better"/preferable device. In this case I would issue the following command:

$ echo "options snd_intel8x0 index=-2" |sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

The above command effectively forces the snd_intel8x0 driver to not grab the first available index in the presence of other drivers.

So -- what info is needed for you guys? Please /attach/ (don't comment inline) the output from ``lspci -v && cat /proc/asound/cards''. Also indicate which of the cards you wish to use as the primary one and whether asoundconf(1) [with the convenience macro mentioned above] works when you invoke it by hand and restart ALSA apps (this does not affect OSS emulation).