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

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Jeremy Nickurak at 15/06/10 16:31 did gyre and gimble:
> On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 01:40, Colin Guthrie <gmane at colin.guthr.ie> wrote:
>> I really don't think this is wise. There are so many cases where this
>> doesn't work. If you are in the process of plugging something in, you
>> *expect* to have to take some action. You're in the mind set that you'll
>> need to take action to make the device work.
> 
> Can't disagree strongly enough here.
> 
> When you plug headphones into your laptop, the sound switches from the
> speakers to the headphones. No intervention. This should definitely be
> the same case with plugging in USB headphones.

But speaker jacks are completely different to USB sound devices. You
cannot use them as a comparable example here.

I mean, if I've got some USB speakers which have a jack socket on the
front of them (I'm looking at just such devices right now in front of
me) and I plug in some headphones to the jack socket on my computer, I
do not expect the sound to be moved across from playing on the USB
device to my internal device and subsequently on my headphones when this
happens.

Added to this, there are numerous examples of when I really don't want,
nor would expect this to happen. e.g. I'm playing music and I get my USB
headset to make a VoIP call. My music playing happily on my USB Speakers
and I want it stay there, but as soon as I plug in my headset it
transfers. I'd much rather it stayed where it was. I may want to leave
my USB Headset plugged in (I often do).

I don't think I'm out of the ordinary here. And there are countless
other scenarios where this just doesn't work OOTB.

The general rule is if you can't do something automatically that works
every time, then don't do it automatically at all, but make it easy and
obvious to the user how to do it manually.

Col





-- 

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

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