[LAU] [PlanetCCRMA] Mixer Wowes

[TheOther]

Burkhard Ritter wrote:
> TheOther wrote:
>>  From this (disabling the motherboard sound chip) I inferred that 
>> PulseAudio was developed as a means for helping Windows users transfer 
>> to Linux in a painless manner.  I'm assuming PulseAudio was never 
>> intended to be useful for advanced Linux audio users, because it 
>> wasn't checking for additional sound chips/cards/devices *and* 
>> allowing the user to specify the order in which those sound 
>> chips/cards/devices would be used.  PulseAudio always defaulted to the 
>> motherboard sound chip, and a fair number of Linux sound applications 
>> always default to the default sound chip/card/device (which in the 
>> case of PulseAudio will be the motherboard sound chip.)  Hence, you're 
>> having all this trouble in trying to use a special video/audio card 
>> because PulseAudio and very likely your sound application are only 
>> trying to use your motherboard sound chip, since that is the default.
>>
>> Hope this helps,
>> Stephen.
> 
> This is just wrong. You can change the default card easily from the 
> pulseaudio applet, see a recent thread for details and discussion. I'm 
> beginning to suspect that the bad acceptance of Pulseaudio that's 
> perceivable at least on this list is in not a small part only due to bad 
> user interface design. Namely hiding major functionality in context 
> menus in obscure places.
> 
> Burkhard

Yes, you can change the default sound chip/card in PulseAudio.  You'll 
need to redo this every time you reboot.

However, that didn't solve my problems with applications using 
PulseAudio under Fedora 9.  For some reason which I don't understand, 
the applications were not picking up on my changed PulseAudio default. 
  I then tried to find which configuration files I could change in 
PulseAudio to make my selected sound chip/card/device the default so 
that all sound applications would use it, as you can do with ALSA.

I was never successful.  And I was never able to find good 
documentation telling me how to change the configuration files in 
PulseAudio.  After a month of trying, I said 'to hell with it' and 
disabled my motherboard sound chip.  That solved my problems.

If you know how to tell PulseAudio what order of sound 
card/chip/devices to use and have PulseAudio pass this on to sound 
applications, please tell me.  But don't tell me changing the default 
by right mouse click in that one applet (sorry, I can't tell you now 
which applet that is because I've removed PulseAudio from my system) 
works-- it didn't work for my vanilla Fedora 9 system with PlanetCCRMA 
applications.  I wasn't even running a real time kernel.

Best,
Stephen.