GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 352826
Switching between sound cards should be possible.
Last modified: 2007-06-05 05:12:27 UTC
I have two sound cards in my system. The one on the motherboard is connected to headphones, the other one is linked via optical SDIF to an external amplifier. Most often, I want rhythmbox to control the second sound card but now and then I want to switch to the first one... Older programs like xmms make it possible (although relevant options required some clicking through preferences) so why not rhythmbox? I searched through the web looking for an answer. I found many similar questions but no solutions apart. Some people suggested hacking alsa configuration files but it is not a solution - it changes behaviour of all other programs, too. It's pretty much a blocker for people like me, using more than one card. I can imagine rhythmbox should offer an easy-to-find combo list with available cards. If you do not want to clutter the preferences, you could always show the widget only when more than one card is available.
This is discussed extensively on bug #304200 and also mentioned on bug #302372. This should be done via gstreamer. Maybe rhythmbox could have a UI that allows you to choose which output pipeline you want to use, and allow you to launch gstreamer-properties, like it does for the Import preferences, but the actual guts of it is a gstreamer issue. This bug should probably be closed a duplicate of that bug #304200, and if that bug doesn't address your problem, should probably re-open that bug.
See also bug #329112 in control-center context and bug #329112 for gstreamer context.
(In reply to comment #2) > and bug #329112 for gstreamer context. Make that bug #341983.
Thanks of all the links - they made for a very interesting read! They are relevant at least to some extent. The proposed solutions - as far as I can see - make it possible to build the sound pipeline statically. They do not provide a way of quick switching between different output pipelines. Who wants to search for a control center/gstreamer-properties and crawl through the settings if one wants to change *rhythmbox* behaviour? It's unintuitive at best, I think.
As I suggested in comment #1, rhythmbox could be enhanced to be able read that info from the gstreamer properties and present it in a sensible easy-to-toggle place in the UI somewhere. Exactly how that would work, I don't know but it's do-able in principle. James Livingston (rhythmbox maintainer) is moving right now, perhaps he or one of the other developers can make more sensible suggestions than I.
Created attachment 75365 [details] [review] patch Gnome 2.18 now has separate setting for this, and are exposed in recent versions of gconfaudiosink. This trivial patch sets us to use the "Music and Movies" profile, if it's supported. I haven't done any testing, but it should work.
It seems that g_object_set (sink, "profile", "music", NULL); would work as well (I only quickly tested using gst-launch), and "music" is a bit more explicit than 1 imo ;)
An equivalent patch was committed recently (bug 379314). Is there anything left to do here?
1. What is this gconfaudiosink you are talking about? I do not see this installed on my system. 2. If the patch allows to quickly switch between sound devices used by rhythmbox, the only thing left to do is to make a release! :)
Pawel, there were releases since that patch was committed, did you get a chance to check if you consider that bug fixed?
Yes, thanks - I see there is audio input/output selection menu and it works fine!