alsamixer / amixer cannot control USB sound card (Tascam US4x4)?

Question

I bought used TASCAM US4x4

It just works - and that is great. There're some issues:

- cracking noise during CPU / IO intensive tasks running on PC
- a glitch on first use in every session

but these I already read about when doing my research before the purchase

More immediate and pressing issue is that I cannot control this card with alsamixer / amixer.

Alsamixer, after updating to the latest kernel, says "This device does not have any controls"

So I don't have a programmatic master volume control.

I configured softvol plugin, but it works with delay.

I read about alsactl somewhere, ran "man alsactl" and read this: "If your card has features that you can't seem to control from a mixer application, you have come to the right place"

Not sure if it applies to this case, but I wanted to try to store settings, update them and load back to card. But alsactl store always saves controls of ALL available sound cards (and that's A LOT of conrols)

Answer 1

The solution I arrived to is using JACK + jack_plumbing + jack_mix_box utility (from jack-mixer package)

jack_mixer's volume control works without delay

I yet have to route sound from all alsa-using apps to jack and resolve some other secondary problems, will update my answer then.