[pulseaudio-discuss] Moving streams without pavuontrol

[Vegard Vesterheim]

On Fri, 19 Feb 2010 10:18:42 +0000 Colin Guthrie <gmane at colin.guthr.ie> wrote:

> 'Twas brillig, and Vegard Vesterheim at 19/02/10 09:36 did gyre and gimble:
>> The ability to use programs like pavucontrol to move streams between
>> sound cards dynamically is very nice. But if the sound is very short
>> it can be a bit cumbersome to do this directly via the gui. I wanted
>> to move an alert sound from my IM-client from the headphones to the
>> external speakers, but the sound entry appears and disappears too
>> quickly for me to catch it in the gui. To work around this, I simply
>> temporarily changed the sound to a longer one, giving me enough time
>> to click in the gui ;-) 
>> 
>> Surely there must be a better way to do this?
>
> Yes. Event sounds should be tagged in their proplist as
> media.role=event

Hmm. This answers the specific use case that I used to describe the
problem. But it doesn't really solve the more generic use case about
being able to manipulate sound routing without using the gui.

I understand the mechanism about tagging sounds, I think it is a good
idea, and I agree that this will solve many problems related to
sound routing.  But this requires cooperation from each and every
application itself, using the relevant standardised mechanisms. But this
is not common yet, and even if I we eventually get there, I think
there will still be a need to have an alternative mechanism for doing
sound routing.

 - Vegard V -