[pulseaudio-discuss] USB audio adapter

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Wolfgang Rohdewald at 15/06/12 16:02 did gyre and gimble:
> Hi,
> 
> if I plug in an USB audio adapter, I want  sound for all applications to
> be switched from internal speakers to the USB adapter, automatically.
> And if I remove the adapter, back to internal speakers.
> 
> what is the recommended way of doing this?

With the present code there is only one option to enable this properly,
and that's using module-device-manager with the do_routing=1 flag.

Sadly the only UI to adjust this is via KDE's kcm_phonon configuration
panel.

Longer term we're hoping to leverage something I've long talked about
but taken forever to implement which is device priority lists for
routing. I do actually have a minimal PoC version working but it's far
from complete and will likely be dropped completely in favour of a wider
reaching system that will ultimately be used on desktops to do the same
thing which is being developed by our friends at Intel.

> I noticed that pavucontrol does not see new connected USB devices,
> not even after restarting it. I have to do (kubuntu 12.04, pulseaudio 1.1)

Something is wrong if they do not show up here.

> service pulseaudio reload

This should only be relevant if you run system-wide mode this is
certainly not the default, nor recommended setup.

> first, but this not only reloads configuration, it actually does a restart,
> killing pulseaudio. So my application (vdr-sxfe) loses sound, and I have
> to restart it too.

Do you really need to have the system-wide PA running? If you are using
vdr, that may be a reason to use system-wide mode...

> removing the USB audio adapter works, sort of. The sound is switched
> elsewhere. But there is my 2nd problem: My notebook has a graphics
> adapter with HDMI output. I want to disable this forever. But if I
> do that in pavucontrol or in the KDE sound mixer, this only holds for
> some time, the device always comes back and is preferrably used by
> pulseaudio.

If you set the card profile to Off, it should never be used.

It sounds like there are some components here that are not optimally
compiled/configured.

As you are using system-wide mode, the KDE routing module will not be
loaded (it's only loaded in per-user mode) and thus I'd recommend adding
it manually to your system.pa file.

> when I disable sound profiles in pavucontrol and reload/restart
> pulseaudio, they are enabled again.

This smells like you are somehow running the system wide version and the
per-user version, or that the the system wide version is somehow not
saving things.

The system wide version gets very little test coverage from us, so this
is not entirely uncommon.

If you could perhaps check a few more things (ensuring there is only one
daemon running - no per-user daemons etc), I can advise better?

Of course, because my reply is several months late, maybe things are
magically working now!!

Cheers

Col

-- 

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

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