Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 327631
pulseaudio doesn't save settings or work with system sound configuration
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:12:18 EST
Description of problem: With multiple soundcards in my system (Audigy/snd_emu10k1 and Intel ESB2/snd_intel8x0), pulseaudio does not play nice. I have configured Fedora through system-config-soundcard and gnome-sound-properties to use my Audigy as the default output device, and testing it in those utilities works fine. Whenever I try to play sound, however, everything comes out of the Intel chipset. When I look at pulse's volume control, I see the streams that are playing, and can move them to the correct sound card (which is way cool). Under output devices, the Intel ESB2 is set as the default stream handler (which is NOT obvious! you have to right click each device to find out if it's the default), which is not what the system is configured for. By the way, if a program does not go through pulseaudio (e.g., amarok which uses xine instead of gstreamer right now), it uses the correct sound card. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): pulseaudio-0.9.7-0.15.svn20071001.fc8 alsa-plugins-pulseaudio-1.0.14-4.fc8 How reproducible: Always. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Configure audio with system-config-soundcard and/or gnome-sound-properties 2. Reboot 3. Play something through alsa/gstreamer (totem, flashplugin, etc) Actual results: Sound is output to the wrong soundcard (Intel ESB2) Expected results: Sound is output to the system configured sound card (Audigy) Additional info:
system-config-sound is obsolete now, since it doesn't really work well with hotplug sound cards, and causes more problems then it solves in such setups. For now, pavucontrol is the way to go for defining the default sound card. For F9 we will probably integrate this better with gnome-sound-properties. Oh, and pavucontrol even includes a "hint" line at the bottom that tries to inform you about the right click menu. I know this isn't perfect. But yepp, that's another story. pavucontrol could need some love, that's for sure. I am closing this bug now, since system-config-soundcard is obsolete for configuring audio, it's fine for testing, but not for configuring. It has been removed from firstboot as well. The correct way to identify sound devices these days is through stable HAL UDIs, which is what PA does. Using ever-changing and conflicting indexes (like s-c-s does) is problematic and thus no longer recommended.