[pulseaudio-discuss] Changing default soundcard on attach/detach of soundcards

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Jan Braun at 15/07/10 06:07 did gyre and gimble:
> Colin Guthrie schrob:
>> 'Twas brillig, and Jeremy Nickurak at 16/06/10 16:04 did gyre and gimble:
>>> Does pulseaudio perhaps need to be throwing some visual indication to
>>> the user that streams switched devices as a result of a plug event,
>>> maybe with a very simple pointer to where to go to fix things?
>>
>> I've got plans for that too.... even a git branch, but at present it's
>> not overly easy as PA modules cannot integrate with the glib main loop
>> too easily...
> 
> Huh? Sorry for possibly being dense, but
> 
> 1. Shouldn't PA do only obvious things automatically, and not bug the
>    user about obvious things? The proposition "PA automaticallly breaks
>    stuff, so it needs to show the user how to unbreak it" seems flawed.

Depends on your definition. I'm a firm believer of doing the right thing
automatically and if you can't work out what the "right thing" is, then
don't do it at all. But when it does do something automatically, I'd
quite like to be informed about it. This already happens on KDE with
their Phonon system, so it's not unprecedented, but all the same it may
not be liked by Gnomey folk. But hey, it will be optional.

> 2. Isn't PA a daemon and thus can't interact with the user? Or did you
>    mean "set a flag that pavucontrol etc. can read"? But then the user
>    still would have to run pavucontrol on their own...

Not quite. When X11 is initialised, the script start-pulseaudio-x11 is
loaded. This loads a couple modules just now that allow PA to stay alive
for the duration of the X11 session (e.g. it wont quit automatically
after a timeout). It also plugs its settings into the the X11 props of
the root window for automatic network support when running remote
applications via SSH with X11 forwarding etc.

It would be pretty trivial to load a "notification" module in the
start-pulseaudio-x11 script and this was my intention.

> If you can't tell, I'm concerned about PA not staying out of my way.

It'll be a module, so it will be optional.

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/]