[Discussion] Why doesn't ALSA autogenerate/autoconfigure the mono profile by default?

[xeroxslayer]

I raised this discussion a few months ago on the ALSA mailing list, but there was no response regarding this.

This was pointed out by a reddit user, and to be frank, I was kinda surprised that this is not done by default. The user in question is hearing impaired (can listen on only one ear), so the user has no benefit of actually listening to stereo or any other multichannel audio, thus wanted to just set everything to mono (dual mono I presume) and was puzzled when there was no such option in pulseaudio (which pulls the profiles from ALSA). Now, this profile will be autogenerated, but only if the hardware has such capability (as is the case with any other profile). You can enable it manually by editing config files (in which case I presume the channel downconversion is done in software, I wouldn't know, I haven't actually tried adding a mono profile manually), but it seemed odd that one has to go through such trouble just to listen to mono sound... something that should be available out of the box IMO.