There are tutorials. But audio for the most part is a command line adventure game. Even after 20+ years of linux and alsa.
http://alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Main_Page
http://alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Documentation
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Sof...Documentation/
http://jackaudio.org/
http://jackaudio.org/faq/
http://jackaudio.org/faq/pulseaudio_and_jack.html
For alsa only make and use a $HOME/.asoundrc file. It doesn't have to be fancy.
Code:
defaults.ctl.card 1
defaults.pcm.card 1
defaults.pcm.device 0
For pulse audio, install it (probably already is). Install pavucontrol (probably is not installed).
Code:
$ pulseaudio --start
$ pavucontrol
Lots of options, jack is optional, pulseaudio is optional (although you might need to uninstall it to opt out). Alsa is in the kernel (nowadays anyway) and is the sound card driver. Bad sound can still result, if you're resampling the audio, like 44.1kHz (cd quality) to 48kHz (video quality). This can get a bit out of hand when the application resamples, the other audio layer like pulseaudio resamples AGAIN, then the driver resamples YET AGAIN, and it's an otherwise resource starved machine. You can layer things and go a bit crazy with it. Alsa even has a loopback device to create a fake soundcard who's output is it's input so you can run jack on that to alsa (snd-aloop), which you can route to pulseaudio (alsaloop). Which in turns pipes it back to jack with an actual hardware soundcard. The more you can dumb down your configuration, the lower the latency and the fewer the artifacts. Not to imply better, depending on your speakers. A few filters like high pass to cut frequencies below 60Hz, and low pass to cut frequencies above 16kHz can significantly improve how things sound. Your speakers might only be capable of 60Hz - 16kHz ranges of sound. Without removing the fringe sounds it'll still TRY to make them output, poorly. Not that any of that relates to your setup.
The short story, remove the layers until you get basic sound that sounds good.
$ speaker-test -c 2 -l 1 -D default
The -D part can be any valid output. Like "pulse" for pulseaudio, or "jack" for jack audio, or "hw:1" for alsa's name for hardware devices. Also check your mixer levels as some soundcards sound better near 75% of it's volume range. But sound horrifyingly ugly at 100%. And by default sound is muted in a lot of cases.
$ alsamixer -c 1
In the case of pulseaudio and pavucontrol a lot of these preferences are GUI based and clickable. If setup correctly by the distro about as brain dead as it has been in linux. But still quirky, sometimes you have to disable and re-enable a device to get good results (again).
The soundcards as recognized by alsa have an index number. You can look at your options in /proc/asound/cards. By default hw:0 is the default soundcard. Which might be your webcam, since machines have sooo many soundcards these days.
Code:
$ cat /proc/asound/cards
