I like to have the option of playing music on my headphones or outputting to the stereo – it really improves family life when they don’t always have to hear my dubstep ;) Unfortunately, the sound cards and devices you have available don’t always fit together nicely. For Linux users, ALSA gives you a lot of control and flexibility over audio devices. However, it is usually difficult to figure out exactly what needs to be done to output to multiple audio devices.
In my case, I have an onboard audio device with optical digital out. But onboard audio usually receives a lot of noise from the rest of the components on the motherboard – your headphones buzz when a hard drive seeks or you move your mouse pointer. I have broad musical tastes and orchestras sound pretty awful with static in the background. By adding an old-school Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live card, I can get exceptional quality output for headphones.
What caused difficulty was getting audio output to both the onboard and SoundBlaster audio devices at the same time. By default, Linux applications will send audio directly to one specific device. All you need is a properly structured ~/.asoundrc
file to configure ALSA.