Re: sound with Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW

[Richard Lyons <richard@the-place.net>]

On Sun, Feb 17, 2008 at 12:11:11AM +0800, Clayton wrote:

> On Sat, 16 Feb 2008 14:44:59 +0100
> Richard Lyons <richard@the-place.net> wrote:
> > On Sat, Feb 16, 2008 at 03:46:21PM +0800, Clayton wrote:
> > >   <snip>
> > > To solve most of my sound card headaches I bought a pair of USB
> > > headphones, and a pair of high-quality USB speakers. I have also
> > > found that if I blacklist the module for the internal sound card,
> > > when I plug in a USB sound device it becomes the one and only
> > > default sound device, and almost all software talks to it just
> > > fine. (Getting some software to talk to a USB sound card in the
> > > second position is non-trivial....)
> > 
> > Now that is an interesting idea -- walk round the problem.  Thanks for
> > that thought.  What software has problems with this, though?
> 
> With a USB sound card as the only card in default position, I only
> have had a smallish problem with mplayer that the packager should have
> fixed in the next version of mplayer that comes down the pipe.
> 
> With the onboard sound card driver loaded and the USB sound card in the
> second position, you have to explicitly tell your sound application to
> talk to the second ALSA device instead of the first one. I never did
> figure out how to do this with mplayer, and I seem to recall that VLC
> might have been an issue as well. Skype, xine and mpg123 were not
> problems. 
[...]
Thanks for that -- I must investigate the hardware.

> 
> <aside>This is one of the things that Windows got right: when you plug
> in a USB sound device, it automatically becomes the system default for
> sound playback. To me this seems to be logical and desireable behavior,
> but is not what happens with Linux.

I am completely ignorant of how to manage hotplug/udev, but I imagine it
is really easy enough to make a linux box mimic this particular
behaviour -- perhaps someone wiser will tell us how.
</aside>

-- 
richard