[CM] snd, Alsa and RME Multichannel

[Orm Finnendahl]

Hi Bill,

I recently purchased a RME HDSP PCMCIA card with a Multiface and
managed to get the new driver of Paul Davis loaded. aplay works with
2-chanel wav files. I tried to check playback of Multichannel aiff
Files with snd but got errors about unavailable devices (I can't give
you the printout of the error message in the moment as I don't have
the box right now). Since something with oss is mentioned, I guess snd
uses some sort of the oss compatibility layer of alsa. I don't know
very well how everything interacts but maybe you can help by answering
some of my questions below.

1. If snd works with alsa does it use oss or can it access alsa directly?

2. If so, how can that be specified (maybe it has to get compiled into snd)?

3. I heard that snd works multichannel under alsa. If so, does it use
   oss for that (meaning I have to load some of the oss modules of
   alsa)?

Any help is appreciated,

--
Orm