Sound switches to my monitor with USB soundcard when I run earcandy

[Sjors Gielen]

Binary package hint: earcandy

As description says, when I run earcandy, all sound switches to my monitor with USB soundcard. (The package is as in #398617, see dependencies and exact version there. I run kubuntu karmic.)

I know about Earcandy's feature to, when a new sound card is detected, switch sound there - however, this USB soundcard had been connected and wasn't "just" plugged in when I ran Earcandy.

[Sjors Gielen (sgielen)]

I just changed the setting in Preferences, but whenever I right click the Earcandy icon and click Preferences (so the window opens), the same thing still happens. Even after I restart the program, "Move streams to new output" is still disabled, but when I open the preferences screen, sound moves to the USB sound card in my monitor.

[KillerKiwi (killerkiwi2005)]

The issue here is that when ear candy starts it scans the list available sound cards and locks onto the ether the last card or the card with usb in the name..

My reasoning was that if you have a usb device plugged in you probably want to use it... (just like the stereo head phones people are used to )

In 0.6 I planned to add a select box so you can manually change the device ear candy is managing

If you have any suggestions of a better default behavior...

[Sjors Gielen (sgielen)]

What do you think about something like - Don't let earcandy be obtrusive when it just started. When I plug in an USB headset after it's started, fine, but for devices detected initially, just leave it be, and let the device that had audio also be the "fallback" audio device when I plug in a headset and then plug it out again. That would fix it for me, and still leave that nice feature around.
If you want, you could even add a menu item to your right-click menu that says "Switch audio device" to do it manually if the user already had a headset connected and wants to switch control to that (and they don't have pavucontrol running or so). :)

[KillerKiwi (killerkiwi2005)]

Just had a thought in gnome we could read the which card the master volume control is on and default to that on startup...

gconf key /desktop/gnome/sound/default_mixer_device

Not sure how this would work on kde but it would solve the issue on gnome

[Sjors Gielen (sgielen)]

Shouldn't you read stuff like that from Pulseaudio instead of from Gnome's internal configuration? Maybe you could make Earcandy not use one master output channel, since that would effectively disable Pulseaudio's support for letting different applications stream to different sound cards. What about a setup that Earcandy saves the sound card for all applications, and when an USB device is plugged in (after Earcandy loaded the initial list of audio devices), it switches sound from all applications to that device - except those flagged "don't switch when an USB device is connected" or something?

Keep up the good work - even though the application is currently unusable for me because of this bug, it's a very good idea and will certainly make 2009 the Year of the Linux Desktop. ;)

[Alessio Treglia (quadrispro)]

Please try to reproduce with the latest release available in Natty.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for earcandy (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]