On 9/20/09, Emanoil Kotsev <delop...@yahoo.com> wrote: > When starting multimedia application it picks up the default audio device > which is not your headset output. > Shouldn't the switch occur automatically when external speakers or headphones are plugged in? This is the behaviour that I always encountered on Windows and on Linux.
> you can play with aplay -D ... man aplay and findout yourself which device > id the headphone one. > I get the following output: li...@debian-liv:~$ aplay -l **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices **** card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 0: STAC92xx Analog [STAC92xx Analog] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 1: STAC92xx Digital [STAC92xx Digital] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 1: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 3: ATI HDMI [ATI HDMI] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 li...@debian-liv:~$ aplay -L default:CARD=SB HDA ATI SB, STAC92xx Analog Default Audio Device front:CARD=SB,DEV=0 HDA ATI SB, STAC92xx Analog Front speakers surround40:CARD=SB,DEV=0 HDA ATI SB, STAC92xx Analog 4.0 Surround output to Front and Rear speakers surround41:CARD=SB,DEV=0 HDA ATI SB, STAC92xx Analog 4.1 Surround output to Front, Rear and Subwoofer speakers surround50:CARD=SB,DEV=0 HDA ATI SB, STAC92xx Analog 5.0 Surround output to Front, Center and Rear speakers surround51:CARD=SB,DEV=0 HDA ATI SB, STAC92xx Analog 5.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Rear and Subwoofer speakers surround71:CARD=SB,DEV=0 HDA ATI SB, STAC92xx Analog 7.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Side, Rear and Woofer speakers iec958:CARD=SB,DEV=0 HDA ATI SB, STAC92xx Digital IEC958 (S/PDIF) Digital Audio Output null Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture) hdmi:CARD=HDMI HDA ATI HDMI, ATI HDMI HDMI Audio Output I am now testing each PCM device on a .wav file, and the first three (including "front") do not behave differently in the presence of plugged-in headphones. For the fourth and fifth, I get this error: sh>aplay -D surround41 "autumn_(from_the_four_seasons).wav" (5809) Playing WAVE 'autumn_(from_the_four_seasons).wav' : Signed 16 bit Little Endian, Rate 44100 Hz, Stereo aplay: set_params:957: Broken configuration for this PCM: no configurations available sh>aplay -D surround41 "autumn_(from_the_four_seasons).wav" (5809) returned '1' The next two, surround51 and surround71, behave in the same way as first three: when headphones are plugged in, the speaker is not muted and the audio stream is not switched to the headphones. Probably as expected, iec958 and null produce no perceivable sound output. I also did this debugging on alsa 1.0.21 (unstable), with no change in behaviour. A wild guess: could JACK of PulseAudio help in such cases? Would it be worth understanding how they work and configure them? I also found this post [1] that suggests to rebuild alsa with ./configure --with-oss=yes --with-sequencer=yes --with-cards=hda-intel Is there way to find out whether the one shipped on Debian is built in this way? Liviu [1] http://www.mail-archive.com/alsa-u...@lists.sourceforge.net/msg20526.html