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

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Jeremy Nickurak at 15/06/10 17:46 did gyre and gimble:
> 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.

Yes of course that's allowed. The whole ability to order them is the
main point of my proposal.

The only thing that's being debated here is what happens when a brand
new, never seen before device is plugged in.

>> 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?

Of course not.... I'm beginning to think that you're arguing something
very different to me. I'm not suggesting for a second that the user
would have to configure something every time they plug/unplug a device.
Only that they *will* need to configure things one. We will not do
anything too clever automatically, i.e. without the user's direct
intervension unless we know we'll get it right in the vast, vast
majority of cases. I think the VoIP streams on Headsets is the likely
case for when we can get things right 99% of the time automatically.
That's not to say the user cannot make a configuration override that
will subsequently be used in preference to our automatic choices however.

> 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....)


OK, this confirms that we're not arguing the same thing.

If you read my proposal, (the first link I posted very near the
beginning of this thread) you'll see that this setup will be easily
supported.

The only think I've been talking about (and due to the concepts I'd
written in my proposal, I presumed you were talking about too) is what
happens the very *first* time a device is plugged in.

Col.


-- 

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

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