gnome-sound-properties should call asoundconf

It did the first release it was coupled with control-center. However, it hasn't been fixed. Do you have a patch?

http://mfedyk.livejournal.com/13270.html

In the above link I have detailed how I have straced g-s-p to see it only reads and closes ~/.asoundrc.asoundconf, but does not write to it.

Can you give more details on what you mean by "It did the first release it was coupled with control-center"?

Ran g-s-p and changed the output devices to headset.

Thank you for your bug. Could you explain why using asounfconf would be better than the current way?

"Why doesn't the audio output device change when I set it in the gnome-sound-properties (g-s-p)?"

I have been seeing this for a while, as far back as dapper, but tabled looking into it until just now. Changing the output device in g-s-p affected gnome apps, but not anything non-gnome that used alsa or oss directly like vlc.

Running strace on g-s-p revealed some files to lookup and google brought me ubuntu bug #31893 and the two commands below to set the default sound card for alsa (non-gnome apps) to use:

    asoundconf list
    asoundconf set-default-card <devicename>

This configures some nice settings in ~/.asoundrc.asoundconf. Looking at the strace output of g-s-p further shows that ~/.asoundrc.asoundconf is being open()ed, mmap()ed, read(), close()d and unmmap()ed, but not written to by g-s-p.

That explains why the sound settings only affected gnome applications and since these settings are read by the alsa libraries, it is only checked when each process starts up. Any changes made with asoundconf will not take affect until after a process using alsa is exited and started again to get the alsa libs to re-read the config files.

So why isn't g-s-p changing the generic alsa configs? The asoundconf man page says:

<manpage>
    This program is under development. Its features will change without notice and without preservation of backward compatibility, except insofar as they are put to use by other components of the Debian and/or Ubuntu operating systems. (As of this writing the Ubuntu developers have plans to use asoundconf for setting the value of defaults.pcm.card from the system sound preferences menu.)
</manpage>

In feisty (or possibly edgy, I have avoided using edgy because I haven't had much success with that release), they have made the distinction in g-s-p between "sound events", "music and movies" and "audio conferencing". The task of finding a way to present configuration options for a default sound card for regular non-gnome alsa apps will use and presenting the options in an intuitive way may be difficult.

We will not likely work on that, everybody is not using alsa and using asoundconf would not be correct then. The desktop integration is done on the desktop by making applications use gstreamer