Splitting front and rear outputs I had a lot of trouble first figuring out how I could split front and rear channels into two devices that could be used independently. The following .asoundrc file is what I came up with. It can be used with 'mplayer', for example, as follows: mplayer -ao alsa1x:frontx file1.avi mplayer -ao alsa1x:rearx file2.mp3 Enjoy... pcm.dshare { type dmix ipc_key 2048 slave { pcm "hw:0" rate 44100 period_time 0 period_size 1024 buffer_size 8192 channels 4 } bindings { 0 0 1 1 2 2 3 3 } } pcm.frontx { type plug slave { pcm "dshare" channels 4 } ttable.0.0 1 ttable.1.1 1 } pcm.rearx { type plug slave { pcm "dshare" channels 4 } ttable.0.2 1 ttable.1.3 1 } Note, for ttable you might use fractions but then you cannot use LC_NUMERIC locales that use characters other than '.' as decimal separator. Actually this is a bug and has already been fixed in versions higher than 1.0.8.