[pulseaudio-discuss] Inserting headphone "locks" audio

[Sean Greenslade]

On Sun, Aug 06, 2023 at 07:55:22AM -0700, John Oliver wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 5, 2023 at 11:23 PM Sean Greenslade <sean at seangreenslade.com>
> wrote:
> > I suspect what you will need to do is to make sure that the internal
> > card (likely the top one in pavucontrol) profile is set to your correct
> > HDMI port, and then select that card as the default in the Output
> > Devices tab. Some applications may not respect the default, but you can
> > move them over to the internal card by using the drop-down in the
> > playback tab.
>
> How would I do that?  Sorry, I know next to nothing about this stuff.
 
In pavucontrol, the relevant tabs are "Playback" and "Output Devices".

The Playback tab shows all applications that are currently outputting
sound. When you have multiple sound cards available, each application
line will also have a drop-down box to select which sound card to send
the application's sound to. This drop-down will change the output
on-the-fly.

On the Output Devices tab, you will have a line for every sound card
currently attached to your system. At the far right of each line, there
is a group of three buttons. One is the card mute, one is the Left-Right
volume unlock, and the last one is the "Set as Default" button. Only
one card in your system can be selected as the default. You generally
only need to select your desired default once, then Pulse should
remember that selection going forward. That said, not all applications
respect the default. Some pulse-aware applications have their own
internal settings for which card they select, and most applications will
return to the card they last used if you had manually moved it to a
different card in the Playback tab.

Hopefully this helps. Let me know if anything is still unclear.

--Sean