All the tutorials I can find is just telling me to jUSt UsE tHe DefAUltS (or even to use SDL or some similar library instead of my own solution), but some more advanced features such as getting HD rumble working on controllers with such features would require to connect to select devices.

So far I've tried:

• using library functions, but they give weird results for some reason.
• reading the contents of /proc/asound/cards, which supposed to work and contains some very useful addresses, but not the PCM handles themselves.

Unfortunately, 99% of my search results is about how to configure ALSA to be used in Linux, which is obviously not what I need.