Gnome volume

I’ve recently bought an external 5.1 soundcard for my laptop. I’ve been thinking about how the sound system should work. I was quite impressed that when I plugged in my usb soundcard and I opened gnome-alsamixer I saw a usb audio soundcard. But there is no way of selecting it as a default soundcard.
This is how it should work.

Use cases:

• I plug in the new soundcard. My system detects the new sound card and it should be accessible through alsa. (This already works) When I right click the menu applet I should see all of my soundcard in a list, with the default one selected, this is the card that was there before I plugged in the usb card. When I select the usb card it should become the default soundcard for alsa (also gstreamer and esound should start using it).
• When my usb soundcard is selected as output device and I remove it from the system. The next soundcard should become the selected one.
• When there’s just one soundcard in the system. The mixer appelt shouldn’t show the soundcard. The applet just stays the same.

This would make using multiple soundcards a lot easier. The only problem is that I can’t found any docs on how to select a soundcard as the system wide default output device. When you look at beepmp you can select all you’re soundcards and a default soundcard. This is wat the selected soundcard should be become.

An other thing is selecting the speaker configuration. I have a nforce chipset in my laptop, which has a 6 outputs (5.1) but only one output is made available. The same way when you have a 5.1 soundcard but only 2 speakers connected. This is also something that the user should be able to configure in the mixer applet. The applet should show the available configuration for that soundcard. For a 6 channel soundcard this should be 2, 2.1, 4, 4.1, 5.1. The user can than select the configuration. When you have a 5.1 soundcard but you connect just two speakers. Totem shouldn’t output 5.1 audio but downmix it to just two channels.

This is how I see things should work. But if someone feels different. Please let me now and point me out where I’m wrong.