[pulseaudio-discuss] Why no 'default device' option?

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Lennart Poettering at 17/12/09 09:28 did gyre and gimble:
> On Thu, 26.11.09 08:40, Colin Guthrie (gmane at colin.guthr.ie) wrote:
> 
>>
>> 'Twas brillig, and Daniel Chen at 25/11/09 19:50 did gyre and gimble:
>>> On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 12:14 PM, Vadim Peretokin <vperetokin at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Currently with PulseAudio, every new app that I start will use the onboard
>>>> sound card. I have to manually go to pavucontrol, and change the streams to
>>>> my headset
>>>
>>> The new gnome-volume-control applet shipped in 2.28 works just fine
>>> for this use case. I know at least it works in Fedora 12 and Ubuntu
>>> 9.10 running 0.9.21, having just tested each on a different machine
>>> both with internal audio and a usb audio device.
>>
>> Yeah (I meant to mention this in my reply too but forgot!). The
>> g-v-c system will actually update the stream-restore database in PA
>> to rewrite the previously stored devices. This is the critical
>> difference between it and pavucontrol in terms of the defaults.
>>
>> Personally I find it all rather clunky and would like to see more
>> robust handling inside PA in this regard.
> 
> "Robust"? what do you mean?

Just that for the operation of "setting the default device" (which is a
fairly simple sounding operation) is currently rather clunky - a client
which impelemtns this "default device" setting currently has to rewrite
some module-stream-restore database does it not? (I thought this was the
fundamental difference between g-v-c and pavucontrol in this regard).

What I meant by "more robust" was simply an API call we could use that
did all the rewriting rather than have g-v-c implement it directly.

> Future versions of g-v-c will most likely have some UI so that you may
> select the device specifically for some important roles (such as
> music, video, communication).

I really hope that before that happens we can work out a standard
framework for priority lists. I still think that picking just one device
for "audio" is not enough for people. Lots of people dock their laptops
at work or home and have USB speakers (I have this) when at home I want
one device, when at work I want another and a simple priority list of
devices for "audio" roles is the best way to achieve this IMO (which is
what module-device-manager currently implements)

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

Day Job:
  Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/]
Open Source:
  Mandriva Linux Contributor [http://www.mandriva.com/]
  PulseAudio Hacker [http://www.pulseaudio.org/]
  Trac Hacker [http://trac.edgewall.org/]