[pulseaudio-discuss] nearly solved pulseaudio configuration

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Sat, 2016-03-05 at 20:19 -0500, Jude DaShiell wrote:
> Thanks to tanuk at iki.fi I got vlc playing over my usb speakers.  The screen 
> reader speech is still going out over the 3.5MM jack speakers.  My guess 
> is I may have to fix asound.state or asound.conf I'll find out in a little 
> while.  My /etc/pulse/default.pa to get this far follows the last line I 
> modified with the help of tanuk at iki.fi to get this working to the point it 
> works now.  The rest is as installed on talkingarchlinux at 
> http://talkingarch.tk/ and I put an r.f.e. in with that distro to have usb 
> ports checked for speakers and doing sound card output search selection:

Usually applications don't choose the device themselves when using
pulseaudio. I can think of three explanations why the screen reader
would not be affected by the default sink setting:

1) The screen reader actually does explicitly select the internal sound
card sink rather than the usb sink. In this case contacting the
talkingarchlinux folks or the screen reader developers is the right
approach.

2) You have at some point manually moved the screen reader stream to
the internal sound card sink, and pulseaudio remembers that as your
preference. In this case the default sink setting is ignored. You can
fix this by passing paramter "restore_device=no" to module-stream-
restore, so change this line in default.pa:

    load-module module-stream-restore

to

    load-module module-stream-restore restore_device=no

That change makes it so that manual stream moves are not remembered, so
the default sink setting always determines where new streams are
routed.

3) The screen reader doesn't go through pulseaudio, but accesses the
internal sound card directly. You can check this with this command:

    lsof /dev/snd/pcm*

The command prints a table of information, with the first line
containing the table column headers. The subsequent lines contain
information about the processes that are using the sound cards. The
first column contains the process name, and if the screen reader
appears there, it's using the sound card directly.

-- 
Tanu