Hypothetical HAL enabled programs

[Sjoerd Simons]

On Wed, Feb 23, 2005 at 08:19:28PM +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:
> I'll give you the situation. I have a laptop with a internal Intel
> soundcard that I use 20% of the time when I'm on the move. When I'm at
> home, and I play music I use my external MP3+ soundcard so I can use the
> 48KHz optical link to my amp.
> 
> Currently, on Fedora, I used to run system-config-soundcard, enter my root
> password, and select the new default for gstreamer. Hassle.
> 
> As a bodge, I made /etc/asound.conf world writable and wrote a script to
> just echo:
> pcm.!default { type hw card x }
> ctl.!default { type hw card x }
> into that conf file. Which works nicely, but isn't very user friendly.
> 
> If I wrote an applet that picked up the available soundcards from HAL,
> picked the preferred one each time (but let me change it manually)
> and write the new file. But, where would I put it?

Do you really want to do this on the alsa level? This means that if you plug in
your usb sound card, you need to restart all sound playing applications right ?

Personally it be very interesting if this was done in a sound server
(Polypaudio seems promising these days), so that you can actually switch
streams from one device to another runtime and transparent for your 
applications.. 

It's very easy to imaging some cool use-cases for this. The one you said, plug
in a better soundcard and have your sound automagically going there (and back
if you unplug it). Switching your voip calls from a headset to your speakers etc.
Got a little off-topic maybe, but where i imagine hal coming in is to tell
polypaudio directly or some policy agent when device are appearing and removed
etc.

  Sjoerd
-- 
Wernher von Braun settled for a V-2 when he coulda had a V-8.
_______________________________________________
hal mailing list
hal at lists.freedesktop.org
http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/hal