On 3/15/07, david <gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com> wrote:
Mark Knecht wrote:
On 3/15/07, Lee Revell
<rlrevell(a)joe-job.com> wrote:
On 3/15/07, Mark Knecht
<markknecht(a)gmail.com> wrote:
My question is whether Alsa has a user level
mechanism to allow me
in a terminal, on the fly, to switch which card Gnome considers my
default sound card?
I was wondering about flipping a bit somewhere and directing
Internet radio in my browser to the stereo instead of the wimpy PC
speaker we have on my wife's box.
Not currently possible.
I guess to implement this, alsa-lib would have to use inotify to watch
the config files for changes, and the app would register a "sound
device changed" callback that would be invoked when
gnome-sound-properties writes the new .asoundrc. The callback would
have to close and reopen the default PCM and resume playback.
Lee
Thanks Lee
I'm not sure why something like this hasn't been implemented before.
Lots of machines have multiple sound cards. It seems like a natural
use to want to use one sometimes and another at other times.
Hmm, in 20+ years of PC ownership, I only just last year got a machine
that could have two sound cards - but I have the onboard sound disabled
in favor of a much better PCI sound card. Most PCs I've seen sold only
come with one sound card.
I serious doubt that any ordinary, non-musician computer user has any
interest in switching between multiple sound cards on the fly.
Yeah, this part I agree with. However there are more interesting
machines out there now meant for watching TV, etc., that do have
multiple outputs. Clearly, on this list it's a pretty common
occurrence since we use higher end cards and have access to whatever
was in the system.
In my specific case I tend to install 2 or sometimes 3 additional
sound cards in most of my boxes for specific studio reasons. However
I've never needed to switch what the OS calls the default since I
didn't care much about the sound that the OS or main apps like Firefox
wanted to generate. It's only just recently I started playing with
Internet radio outside of iTunes, which I love by the way but would
rather use something Open Source. (MEdia - don't care about the app
especially) There is a lot of great audio material out there ready to
come at us through our browsers.
I made a suggestion to the Aqualung design team that they should
consider finding a way to make Aqualung work inside a browser like
Songbird does. It would be really great to have a groovy Jack app
doing the browser sound management for me. I'd love that.
Cheers,
Mark