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

[Jeremy Nickurak]

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 10:05, Colin Guthrie <gmane at colin.guthr.ie> wrote:
> 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).

Okay, then the headset should be configured somehow to never become
the fallback. Maybe that's automatic based on profile information....
but it should probably be overridable. Let the user say what devices
are potential fall-back devices, and probably allow an ordering for
them.

OTOH, if I've got my nice new A2DP bluetooth headset, and I associate
it with my laptop, I probably immediately want all the "fallback"
music taken off the crummy tinny speakers onto my headset, without
intervention. Likewise for my home theatre system if I plug in there.

> 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.

That's a great philosophy... but it applies mostly to hard-coding
things. We don't want the user to have to open up a control panel and
reconfigure things every time they plug/unplug a device, right?
Consider the case of docking stations, where any time the user sits
down at their desk, they want the sound redirected to the desktop.
(Although there's a case here to be careful about... we don't want to
take the output to speakers if they're currently blasting high-volume
heavy metal on headphones....)

-- 
Jeremy Nickurak -= Email/XMPP: jeremy at nickurak.ca =-