Multiple Sound cards Howto?

[trumee]

I have two sound cards , a soundblaster live 5.1 digital and an onboard Via8235(Avance Logic ALC650). Is it possible to have these two cards work simultaneously.
Currently i have emu10k1 from http://opensource.creative.com/ loaded as a module and my alsa modules files looks like this
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# ALSA portion
alias char-major-116 snd
# OSS/Free portion
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias snd-card-1 snd-via82xx
## OSS/Free portion
## alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
## alias sound-slot-1 snd-card-1

##

# OSS/Free portion - card #1
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

My creative module file looks like this
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
alias sound emu10k1
post-install emu10k1 /usr/local/etc/emu-script
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

When i fire off alsamixer , it shows up the VIA card, however kmix only shows up the soundblaster mixer. There are two devices in /dev as /dev/dsp and /dev/dsp1, which i feel are created by creative becuase if i remove the VIA modules still the devices still persist.
I want to stick with the opensource drivers for creative because they give me bass and treble control, however i want alsa driver for my VIA card.
Thanks

[checkyoulater]

I actually just installed my onboard sound last week. The reason I wanted both installed was for my headphones. I currently have my 5.1 analog speakers connected to the sblive and my headphones connected (through an amp) to the onboard sound chip. I used OSS drivers for both devices, however. I don't know why you need to mix ALSA and OSS. I believe there is a Via 82XX driver available in the kernel.

1. Installed the sblive using the emu10k1 driver from sourceforge. This is pretty straight forward, and many other threads have already covered it.

2. Rebuild the kernel to build in the module for the i180_audio (which in my case in the onboard SiS chipset in my K7S5A. Choose whichever driver is appropriate, and build as a module.)

3. Reboot and then modprobe i810_audio, or whatever the module is called. When that driver is inserted, it will share the ac97 codec with the emu10k1 driver. I'm not sure which other onboard chipsets use the ac97 codec, but probably most do.

When I want to play through the headphones, I just select /dev/dsp2 as my output device. Ditto for any other application that has sound output. To adjust the volume, you can use aumix and select the appropriate device on startup.

[trumee]

No, in my case the VIA driver(ALC650,via82xx) is not in the kernel. So i have no choice than to go along with alsa. Is it possible to define /dev/dsp2 as the device for alsa driver. It always makes /dev/dsp as the default output. If this can be done , it will hopefully solve the problem.
Thanks

[puggy]

If you look at the alsa config guide its possible to use both your soundcards in alsa, its not much different to installing for 1 really. Couple of extra lines in your alsa configuration, something like this for my soundblaster live and via82xxx.