[pulseaudio-discuss] PulseAudio, switch audio output on device connection

[Mark Gaiser]

On Wed, Oct 8, 2014 at 1:06 PM, Tanu Kaskinen
<tanu.kaskinen at linux.intel.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2014-10-06 at 19:47 +0200, Mark Gaiser wrote:
>> Ok, i tried a bunch of different players. The results:
>> - mplayer (smplayer as well) : sound doesn't switch when attaching a headphone
>> - rhythmbox : refused to play any plain simple mp3 file
>> - amarok : sound doesn't switch when attaching a headphone
>> - dragon player : sound doesn't switch when attaching a headphone
>> ...
>>
>> I did get rhythmbox to beep once and that one came out of my headset.
>> Based on that i'm beginning to think that there is some GTK vs Qt
>> difference in play here.
>>
>> One thing i did found (in the kde settings) was that i can prefer my
>> headphone to be first in sound order. Funny thing is, this is actually
>> working for an application like amarok which then behaves as i expect.
>> However, other apps don't seem that happy to comply and just spew out
>> audio to my jack port.
>
> There shouldn't be that kind of differences between apps, unless you
> have previously moved manually those applications around. What if you
> clear the pulseaudio state by doing this:
>
> - disable autospawning (so that you can be sure pulseaudio isn't running
> during the next steps):
>     cat "autospawn = no" >> ~/.config/pulse/client.conf
>
> - killall pulseaudio
>
> - remove all files under ~/.config/pulse except client.conf
>
> - restart pulseaudio:
>     pulseaudio -D
>
> - load module-switch-on-connect:
>     pactl load-module module-switch-on-connect
>
> Is there still a difference in behaviour between amarok and other
> applications?
>
> Since you use kde, the routing may be a bit different than on my
> machine, if you have module-device-manager loaded, and that might
> explain the general problem of the automatic routing not working as
> expected. When you start your kde session, module-device-manager gets
> loaded. On gnome, for example, that module is not loaded by default.
> Just restarting pulseaudio while the session is running should get rid
> of module-device-manager, because it's only loaded when the session
> starts, but you can of course always unload it with "pactl unload-module
> module-device-manager". You can verify that the module is not loaded by
> running "pactl list modules short". If module-device-manager isn't
> listed, then it isn't loaded.
>
>> Could you perhaps test if you can get the same thing working under mplayer?
>> mplayer -ao pulse <some_mp3_file>
>>
>> That is a quite simple test - easy to reproduce - and doesn't give me
>> the expected result. I wonder how that works with you.
>
> Works fine.
>
> --
> Tanu
>

Thank you very much for your detailed reply.
I will reply later today with my test results. Kinda difficult to do
that from work ;-)