Automatically switch to new devices when connected

[Michael Terry]

Binary package hint: pulseaudio

Some devices, like Bluetooth headphones, don't automatically become used when connected. It would be nice if they were, since that is probably what the user intends (and how line-in headphones work).

I've filed a patch upstream about it. Here's a debdiff using it. My patch adds a new PA module that when a new device is connected, makes it the default for future streams and moves all existing streams on the old default to the new device.

[Jeff Fortin Tam (kiddo)]

There are many people out there who would love to be able to have the audio automatically switch to HDMI when they connect their laptops to a HDTV (for example). Would this patch handle this use case?

[Daniel Hahler (blueyed)]

The switch-on-connect module is in Ubuntu/pulseaudio 12.04, but needs to be added to defaults.pa manually.

Without this module enabled/added, when connecting a bluetooth speaker, it gets automatically used for playback.
However, it is not bound correctly to the volume controls, and starts with a volume of 100%.
See bug 1008539 about this.

I am closing this bug here, because switch-on-connect is now in Ubuntu and even without it, the new device is being used by default.