[pulseaudio-discuss] Forcing a mapping from a stream to a device

[Colin Guthrie]

Hi Matt,

Sorry for the late reply. The message was stuck in the moderation queue
and I hadn't checked it for a while :(

I've a funny feeling we discussed this on IRC but perhaps not.

'Twas brillig, and Matt Feifarek at 19/11/10 21:59 did gyre and gimble:
> Thanks for PulseAudio; I'm a big fan.
> 
> I have two different sound devices in my system; a "sound card" and a
> usb telephony device. I want to force certain streams (by software
> source) to use the telephony device but leave music and other things
> going to the standard sound card.
> 
> I can't seem to make this work; I can make either device "default" and
> then manually move streams from one sink to another, but PA doesn't seem
> to remember correctly. Each "phone call" requires that I move the stream
> again.

Normally the device will be remembered and moving it once should be
enough. Not sure why this wouldn't work (module-stream-restore takes
care of this for you).

Can you provide output "pacmd list-sink-inputs" output when one of these
calls is in progress. The interesting bit will be the stream restore id
in the proplist.

> Specifically, I want to use the new "Gmail dial phones" feature in a
> browser, in this case Chrome, with a "ClearOne Chat 50"... but I want
> everything else to go through my desktop speakers. I suppose if I could
> get it to work, I'd try Skype next.

This will be more complicated as the browser is a general purpose
system, and yet it's trying to do use-case specific things.

Skype should work fine. Skype even identifies it's streams properly -
"phone" for it call audio and "event" for the ringing sound etc.

Generally speaking Chrome will just identify itself as a generic stream
and thus if you use it for phone calls but also e.g. soundcloud.com or
last.fm etc. then these are all handled as the same type of stream and
will be saved and restored accordingly. There is no easy way to identify
them separately :(

> Is there some invocation I can add to my pulse config files to force
> this? I've tried using Earcandy to do this, but it's not very reliable.

Generally speaking, pavucontrol is the app you want. I have no idea what
earcandy is.

Col


-- 

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

Day Job:
  Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/]
Open Source:
  Mageia Contributor [http://www.mageia.org/]
  PulseAudio Hacker [http://www.pulseaudio.org/]
  Trac Hacker [http://trac.edgewall.org/]