[pulseaudio-discuss] Device fallback priority

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Sat, 2020-04-11 at 22:29 +0200, Daniel wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have 2 alsa devices in my system, card 0 is my Nvidia graphics card
> for HDMI Audio output, card 1 is my internal onboard audio. I prefer
> the HDMI Audio via my Nvidia card and setting this as default device
> works just fine.
> 
> When I now add another audio device like via USB or Bluetooth, its
> sink becomes default, and this is quite what I want, so this is fine.
> But when I now disconnect this device again, the new default sink
> always is my internal audio instead of the HDMI audio.
> 
> How can I get the system to fall back to my HDMI Audio after the
> active sink gets unavailable? Can I set priorities manually in
> default.pa or similar?
> 
> The modules module-default-device-restore, module-device-restore,
> module-stream-restore and module-card-restore are loaded. If one of
> these is supposed to do this job, does that need some manual
> configuration? If yes, how?
> 
> I'm running Ubuntu 19.10 64-bit. I already deleted ~.config/pulse and
> restarted pulseaudio to make sure there are no unwanted settings in my
> pulse db files. The file .config/pulse/[id]-default-sink correctly
> contains the HDMI sink in the format of the output below.
> 
> $ pactl info
> Server String: /run/user/1000/pulse/native
> Library Protocol Version: 33
> Server Protocol Version: 33
> Is Local: yes
> Client Index: 8
> Tile Size: 65472
> User Name: daniel
> Host Name: windseeker
> Server Name: pulseaudio
> Server Version: 13.0
> Default Sample Specification: s16le 2ch 44100Hz
> Default Channel Map: front-left,front-right
> Default Sink: alsa_output.pci-0000_01_00.1.hdmi-stereo
> Default Source: alsa_output.pci-0000_01_00.1.hdmi-stereo.monitor
> Cookie: b87b:c3cd
> 
> $ pactl list sinks short
> 1       alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo
> module-alsa-card.c      s16le 2ch 44100Hz       IDLE
> 4       alsa_output.pci-0000_01_00.1.hdmi-stereo
> module-alsa-card.c      s16le 2ch 44100Hz       IDLE

If you never use the internal audio, you can switch the card profile to
"off" with pavucontrol or pactl.

-- 
Tanu

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