The Arch Linux setup guide uses the ALSA sound samples in /usr/share/sounds/alsa to verify that everything’s working:
aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav
Which, as it turned out, worked perfectly: a female voice front-and-center.
Flushed with success, I tried some of the other samples:
cd /usr/share/sounds/alsa/ ls -l total 1212 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 137134 2009-10-20 05:26 Front_Center.wav -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 142128 2009-10-20 05:26 Front_Left.wav -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 146990 2009-10-20 05:26 Front_Right.wav -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 135202 2009-10-20 05:26 Noise.wav -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 130096 2009-10-20 05:26 Rear_Center.wav -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 126064 2009-10-20 05:26 Rear_Left.wav -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 146480 2009-10-20 05:26 Rear_Right.wav -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 134868 2009-10-20 05:26 Side_Left.wav -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 129966 2009-10-20 05:26 Side_Right.wav
All of which played front-and-center.
Come to find out that they’re all recorded in Monaural mode, so the file names don’t really mean anything.
soxi Front_Left.wav Input File : 'Front_Left.wav' Channels : 1 Sample Rate : 48000 Precision : 16-bit Duration : 00:00:01.48 = 71042 samples ~ 111.003 CDDA sectors File Size : 142k Bit Rate : 768k Sample Encoding: 16-bit Signed Integer PCM
Definite disappointment, that… it’s not Arch’s fault, they’re monaural in Ubuntu,too.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 