'Splain please re: mixer, alsa, pulseaudio and tvtime??

[William Case]

Hi;

My problem is not yet with tvtime but my question trail starts there.

tvtime has been upgraded to use alsa for sound rather than OSS.  To do
that I need to re-set  <option name="MixerDevice" value="default/Line"/>
to something like mixer="DEVICE[:CH]" e.g hw:0/CD; where DEVICE = hw:0
and [:CH] = /CD.

ls /dev/mixer no longer exists.  Where does tvtime find DEVICE and where
do I find DEVICE?  How do I know it is the new name of the mixer?

Which channel [:CH] do I use?  Is it from the same list as tvtime.xml
suggests for OSS or is it a different list?  Given that I have an
internal sound card on a PCIe bus how would I go about deducing which
channels to try first?

Now that I have the latest kernel and tvtime upgrade, these questions
are so that I can overcome the confusion of many, many hours of
experimentation and reading of outdated google comments. Hopefully, if I
can solve tvtime or at least be looking at the correct configuration I
can go on to solve problems with RhythmBox and others.

A bit of a rant:  The biggest problem that I have, and that others have
mentioned they have, is the lack of trustworthy documentation --
something that starts with the real basics, on how alsa, pulseaudio, and
the various guis work.

-- 
Regards Bill
Fedora 11, Gnome 2.26.3
Evo.2.26.3, Emacs 22.3.1