[pulseaudio-discuss] Dealing with the PC speaker sound output via ALSA, aka snd-pcsp

[Jeremy Nickurak]

On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 03:36:14PM +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> PA doesn't really impose any order of devices. If a "default" device
> is required and none has been set we pick one. Which one we
> pick is not random, but not deterministic either -- you should not
> depend on any order.

In the broader scheme of things, maybe this is the core issue. My main
use case for pulseaudio is that I have a laptop with a built-in sound
card, but when I'm using it at home, it's docked to a device with a usb
sound card. What I'd really like to happen is to be able to tell
pulseaudio somehow:

"Here are the devices I expect hal to run across (by some identifier,
maybe hal UDI, product/vendor code, connection type, etc). If you see a
USB device, use it, (and move any existing streams over to it when it's
hooked up). If you don't see a USB device, use the PCI device (and move
any existing streams whose sink doesn't exist to it)."

That's a great scenario for me to be in. But it'd also work well for
this pc-speaker scenario. Just change "PCI" into "PC Speaker", and "USB"
into "non-PC-Speaker":

"Here are the devices I expect hal to run across. If you see a
non-PC-speaker device, use it, (and move any existing streams over to it
when it's hooked up). If you don't see a non-PC-Speaker device, use the
PC-Speaker (and move any existing streams whose sink doesn't exist to
it)."