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

[Vegard Vesterheim]

On Fri, 19 Nov 2010 15:59:42 -0600 Matt Feifarek <matt.feifarek at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi there.
>
> 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.

Check out this thread:

http://www.mail-archive.com/pulseaudio-discuss@mail.0pointer.de/msg05512.html

The proper solution to this problem is to have applications give
hints about the *type of sounds* they emit (so-called media roles), and
then configure the system to route sounds to the appropriate device
depending on the type of sounds (VOIP streams to headset, ring tone to
loudspeakers etc)

But, you can also configure separate pulseaudio devices for your
physical devices in your ALSA configuration, and then manually configure
the application to use the different devices.

 - Vegard V -