I am sure this has been answered somewhere, but the information I have been able to find doesn't seem very specific to Slackware or my particular situation.

I want two soundcards - one for things like Amarok and system notifications, the other for my ham radio apps that may be running simulaneously. So I physically install an ES18xx and an Opti93xx cards (yes I know). Alsaconf finds them both and allows me to choose one to configure, which then becomes the only soundcard on the system. Alsamixer then works for just that card, which becomes the default and /dev/dsp.

How can I get both cards working at the same time? I presume that if that happens, one will become /dev/dsp0 and the other /dev/dsp1? Or will they? How can I get my applications to select the correct card?

Would much appreciate a pointer in the right direction.

Slackware 10.2, PIII 500MHz, 256M

Well, I know this isn't exactly the same thing, but I use one physical sound card, and a USB headset which ALSA sees as another sound card.

Make sure that the ALSA modules for the second card are loaded. When alsaconf sets up your system, it sets up links that load the modules at boot time. Since it has only setup one card, it might not have added this information for the second card. If so, you will need to manually load the drivers though rc.local, or rc.modules.

Beyond that, on my system, the second card is /dev/sound/dsp1, and to setup the volumes for it, I would do something like "alsamixer -c 1" (where -c 0 would specify my main sound card).

I think you will need an entry in /etc/modprobe.conf for each card

eg
alias snd-card-0 snd-opti92x
alias snd-card-1 snd-es18xx

more here:

http://alsa.opensrc.org/MultipleCards

tobyl