Oh, I'm specifically referring to pro-audio (a Tascam 8x8 I/O, and a Presonus 1804) interfaces, that my Ubuntu 16.04 system was pretending were "surround sound"

Oh, I'm specifically referring to pro-audio (a Tascam 8x8 I/O, and a Presonus 1804) interfaces, that my Ubuntu 16.04 system was pretending were "surround sound" interfaces, so it's something configuration related, not ALSA/driver itself. (I'm exclusively interested in pro-audio, vs whatever the OP of this comment was concerned with) I have 2 interests with regard to this: 1) writing a driver for a home-brew soundcard with an MCU running the DAC/ADC TDM interfaces, and interfacing with the computer via SPI, as it's clock is a function of the audio sample clock running the whole shebang, and I never saw an SPI transport for ALSA in my life 2) just generally trying to get to the bottom of how linux/ALSA sees my soundcard hardware (the specific multi-channel audio interface being interpreted/configured as a surround sound interface etc.) I mentioned the Device Tree Overlays as it appears that this is how the Bela system manages it's PRU supported audio codecs in Alsa mode, but consider it a clueless comment off-topic... Thanks for writing back, I appreciate it! I'm a big Ardour fan. Jack is standard for everything in pro-audio these days, and yes, I know that you literally have spent 30 ++ years in this realm, hence my questions... By the way, when they ask for "quantizing audio" in Ardour, it's already there! I can say that the following works GREAT in Ardour: 1) strip silence function 2) snap the audio bits created by #1 to grid/quantize value.