Kmix uses wrong sound card [Solved]

[Izmo]

My problem is that kmix uses the worng sound card, and therefore I am unable to adjust the volume using it. I can hear sound, and I can even adjust the volume using alsamixer, but that's an ugly workaround.

My questions therefore are the following:
1) Is it possible to force kmix to use the correct sound card? How? I haven't been able to find any meaningful documentation on this.
2) If not - is it possible to disable the offending sound card in order to force kmix into using the correct one?

Before you answer the second question, I need to elaborate a bit on my setup. The sound card I want to use is the one integrated in the motherboard. The "offending" sound card is not a real sound card, but a HDMI controller on a Nvidia graphics card that is recognized as a sound card. This means that neither disabling the card from the BIOS, nor physically removing the sound card is an option. To make matters worse, both cards use the same module (snd_hda_intel) so blacklisting the module is not an option either.

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lspci | grep -i audio
00:14.2 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)
02:00.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation High Definition Audio Controller (rev a1)

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cat /proc/asound/cards
 0 [SB             ]: HDA-Intel - HDA ATI SB
                      HDA ATI SB at 0xfcdf0000 irq 16
 1 [NVidia         ]: HDA-Intel - HDA NVidia
                      HDA NVidia at 0xfe97c000 irq 18

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cat /proc/asound/modules
 0 snd_hda_intel
 1 snd_hda_intel

Any help would be much appreciated...

[genfool]

Not sure if this helps, couple ideas.
If you open a terminal and as user run the command

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alsamixer

Then while in alsamixer f6 and select correct sound card ... does that help?

Another option could be to open root terminal and run

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alsaconf

select your sound card, complete the installation and then as user, run alsamixer again.
If any of the columns have a (mm) under them, means they are muted.
Use the arrow keys to select column and m key to unmute, + key to turn the volume up

Is possible that you may need to go to start button > system settings > multimedia > phonon and play with that some...
But try these and see if it works for you. Often it is front speakers in alsamixer that are turned down and adjusting the volume level is all I need.

[Izmo]

Thanks for your suggestion, but that's unfortunately not the problem I'm trying to solve. As I mentioned in my original post, I do get sound, and I can even adjust the volume with alsamixer (which quite correctly recognized both devices and picked the correct default). What I'm trying to do is get the convenience of being able to adjust the volume without opening a terminal, and running a command, by getting kmix to do what it's supposed to do.

The problem I'm having is specifically kmix related. Kmix has picked the wrong device as default, and there are no obvious ways of changing it. (And despite lots of googling, I haven't managed to find any non-obvious way either.)

[Izmo]

Ok. Managed to get this working. Using the word "fix" might be something of a stretch since I still don't really know how to change the kmix device. This page suggested it can't be done manually, which IMHO is a mighty boneheaded design decision. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Kmix

What I did do was the following:

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killall kmix
equo remove kmix --ask --configfiles --nodeps
emerge -av kmix

I don't know what precisely is the difference between the entropy-supplied kmix and the locally compiled one, but now kmix works as expected.