[pulseaudio-discuss] ALSA-emulation for multiple devices

[Lennart Poettering]

On Sat, 12.12.09 20:22, Vegard Vesterheim (vegard.vesterheim at uninett.no) wrote:

> I do not understand how pulseaudio arranges ALSA-emulation for
> multiple devices. I have a typical setup with external speakers
> connected to the sound card and an USB Headset.
> 
> My Voip-client (twinkle) uses ALSA. I would like to configure twinkle
> to use external speakers for ring tone, and headset for the normal
> audio. I have a standard .asoundrc as described in the 'Perfect
> Setup', defining a single ALSA device, called 'pulse'. Do I need to
> add an extra entry in my ~/.asoundrc so that ALSA-applications knows
> about my headset?. This must be a pretty normal use-case, but I
> haven't found any documentation about how to accomplish this.

Generally it should be left to PA to choose the device for you. Mostly
only for compat cases it makes sense to let the application choose the
device itself. 

It has been requested before that PA provides ALSA enumeration for all
the devices it covers. I'd be willing to bless a clean patch for that
for alsa-plugins, however personally I'd rather invest the time in
fixing the apps in questions to tag their streams properly so that PA
can distuingish them than to work on this workaround.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4