Featurerequest for a Method AudioOutput.release()

[litolff]

please provide a Method AudioOutput.release()

short story: i want to play 16bit/2.0 24bit/5.0 and 24bit/5.1 flac-files all in the same playlist, without restarting my application whenever channelcount is changing.

use-case:
there are situations alsa has to be reconfigured by altering .asoundrc.
Those changes only take effect when alsa-lib has been released and reloaded.
For now it's necessary to stop the whole application(and python-interpreter) which is using audiotools to force ALSAAudio_dealloc in alsa.c being called.
I tried to implement this by myself but unfortunately without success.

my special use-case for reconfiguring alsa:
instead of writing prosa, here my different .asoundrc
Switching between them with python-code works reliable but changes only take effect after restarting my whole app.

for stereo:
pcm.!default {
type hw
card 0
device 8
}

for 5.0
pcm.!default = {
type= route
slave {
pcm = "hw:0,8"
channels 6
}
ttable {
0.0=1
1.1=1
2.4=1
3.2=1
4.3=1
}
}

for 5.1
pcm.!default = {
type= route
slave {
pcm = "hw:0,8"
channels 6
}
ttable {
0.0=1
1.1=1
2.4=1
3.5=1
4.2=1
5.3=1
}
}

PS: besides using audiotools.player.Player i also tried your more low-level api, to play 16bit/2.0 24bit/5.0 and 24bit/5.1 flac-files all in the same playlist
The code below did the trick, but for audiotools.player.Player i did not find any other solution than the one in the requested feature above (switching .asoundrc).

MASK_20 = ChannelMask.from_fields(front_left=True,front_right=True)
MASK_50 = ChannelMask.from_fields(front_left=True,front_right=True,front_center=True,side_left=True,side_right=True)
MASK_51 = ChannelMask.from_fields(front_left=True,front_right=True,front_center=True,side_left=True,side_right=True,low_frequency=True)

ORDER = {2:[0,1], 5:[1,3,4,2,0,0], 6:[1,4,5,2,3,0]}
MASK = {2:MASK_20, 5:MASK_51, 6:MASK_51}

nChannels = gotFromDatabase(file)
mask = MASK[nChannels]
order = ORDER[nChannels]
flacReader = FlacAudio(uri).to_pcm()
reorderedReader = at.ReorderedPCMReader(flacReader, order, mask)
pcmReader = at.BufferedPCMReader(reorderedReader)