[pulseaudio-discuss] changing default pulseaudio output device

[Samuele Carcagno]

Hi,

I have a problem on a fresh install of Debian Jessie with KDE. On Debian 
Wheezy and Ubuntu Trusty I could change the output device for each 
application through pavucontrol, and upon reboot the application would 
"remember" that device and use it again. On Jessie instead I have to 
change the output device from the default internal soundcard to my 
external soundcard each time the computer is rebooted.

I tried to follow this guide

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/DefaultDevice/

to change the default output device, so I added the following line to 
/etc/pulse/default.pa

set-default-sink 
alsa_output.usb-E-MU_Systems__Inc._E-MU_0404___USB_E-MU-0E-3F04-07D80A14-027A8-STATION_01-00-USB.analog-stereo

and after I did that I also temporarily disabled pulseaudio by

sudo mv /usr/bin/pulseaudio /usr/bin/pulsefoo

so that it wouldn't respawn and terminating it with ksysguard. When 
disabled I deleted the the ~/.config/pulse directory, re-enabled 
pulseaudio and rebooted. Unfortunately applications would still output 
to the internal soundcard by default. I'm pretty sure that I specified 
the name of the external soundcard correctly because if I use that name 
with paswitch 
https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2012/06/switching_pulseaudio_output_device/ 
it works (unfortunately the changes with paswitch are again only temporary).

Not sure if this is somehow related to the above issue, but the settings 
I choose the for Phonon in the KDE multimedia settings don't stick 
either. I select the external soundcard as the default device and upon 
reboot the internal one is on top on the preferences list.

Any suggestions on how to make the settings permanent so that I don't 
have to use pavucontrol each time I reboot the computer?

Cheers,

Sam