Aaugh! Sound devices changed again!

[Gilles J. Seguin]

On Thu, 2015-09-03 at 11:52 -0600, Robin Laing wrote:
> On 2015-09-02 16:10, jdow wrote:
> > On 2015-09-02 05:20, Ian Malone wrote:
> > > On 2 September 2015 at 12:27, Tom Horsley <horsley1953 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > Every single fedora release, and sometimes even just from
> > > > an update where there wasn't a full release, the sound
> > > > devices get renumbered or renamed. The last time I
> > > > tried to play a movie and send the sound to the optical
> > > > output connected to my receiver, this worked:
> > > > 
> > > > pacmd set-card-profile 1 off
> > > > mplayer -vo gl_nosw -ao alsa:device=hw=1.1 -ac hwdts,hwac3,
> > > > -monitoraspect 16:9 -fs "$@"
> > > > 
> > > > I tried it last night for the first time in a while, and
> > > > it doesn't work. I've had to fiddle this script over and
> > > > over again every time sound devices change.
> > > > 
> > > > When are we going to get immutable names for sound devices?
> > > > If they can do it for ethernet ports, surely they can
> > > > do it for sound cards, right? (Though come to think of it
> > > > the "immutable" ethernet port names change in every release
> > > > as well :-).
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > cat /proc/asound/cards
> > >   0 [PCH            ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel PCH
> > >                        HDA Intel PCH at 0xf6420000 irq 82
> > >   1 [NVidia         ]: HDA-Intel - HDA NVidia
> > >                        HDA NVidia at 0xf6080000 irq 36
> > > 
> > > The text in [] can be used as an alsa device name. You can still add
> > > the "," for sub devices.
> > 
> > There is a basic problem here. Cheap USB audio devices tend to behave
> > "cheap". They have no distinguishing features between the dongles. And
> > they are not always found in the same order when you reboot the machine
> > despite their USB address not changing. I have seen this with USB sound
> > dongles, MIDI dongles, and DVB dongles (as used for ultra cheap SDRs.)
> > 
> > The only solution is to develop a tool that can change serial numbers or
> > other identification in the dongles, if an eeprom facility is present,
> > or relying on the user never changing the USB address. In the latter
> > case the name could be followed by " 0/2/4/6" or "0246" for the USB
> > address path though root hub and intermediate hubs to the final device.
> > 
> > Sounds kludgey? Yup. But it can work. Meantime it's not useful to
> > purchase two or three of the same dongle in many cases. Purchase
> > completely differnet dongles. They may have different names and can
> > distinguish themselves that way.
> > 
> > {^_^}
> 
> At least in KDE, you can set a priority for devices.  This allows me to 
> use a USB gaming headset and it will disable the internal sound card, 

install pavucontrol package

/usr/bin/pavucontrol or PulseAudio Volume
it should give you in the Configuration tab a list of your audio devices
for each audio device you can put in Profile, the device to Off

If you goto the Output tab, you have other options like like setting the stream to DTS.

> just as if I had plugged into a headphone jack.
> 
> Robin
>