[hardy] [amd64] system sounds and flash sound output are redirected to the wrong sound card

You might want to install one of the various toos available for pulseaudio to force it to use a particular sound card. Otherwise, it just uses the first card it finds.

If it was not that clear in my original description, setting the desired sound card for playback did work fine for applications like Totem, except for
- System sounds (in System -> Settings -> Audio -> Sounds, e.g. log on, log off...)
- and sound of the Flash plugin (on AMD64).

I also tried to resolve this with padevchooser and paman, but got no sucess.

Anyway, after some further testing, it seems as if it has helped to temporary blacklist the module for the Creative card (that should be the secondary sound device). After this the System and flash sounds are finally played by the Intel card, even if undo the blacklisting, strange indeed.
I was not able to reproduce the previous state so far, even on deleting everything related to pa in my home directory the correct device is choosen for everything. Maybe I'm gonna do a reinstallation of Hardy in the next days and check if it happens again and if I can find another solution beside temporary module blacklisting.

Kind regards,
Jan

I have done some testing on a fresh installation now, and it still seems as if Pulseaudio doesn't like my sound card configuration. Here is a step-by-step description of what I have done after installation:

- setting the Intel card as default device everywhere in System -> Settings -> Audio -> Devices
- then the right card is chosen in "normal" applications, except System sounds and Flash
- editing ~/.pulse/default-sink and inserting the correct device does not help, the change gets automatically reverted if I reboot my system (to name of the Creative card)
- neither does launching 'sudo pulseaudio -C --system' followed by 'set-default-sink index_of_the_Intel_card' in a terminal, so it is just ignored even if specify the desired playback device explicitly.

I guess it would once again help to temporary blacklist the Creative card, but this is of course not a so nice and intuitive solution. And I think it is in general an undesired behaviour if the Settings in System->Settings->Audio->Devices are ignored for some applications and there is no easy way to change that.

Another "workaround" I have tested is to uninstall everything related to Pulseaudio and installing esound, then everythings works fine as it did in Gutsy.

Kind regards,
Jan

Yeah, I have found another way to solve this issue :)

The following mail on ubuntu-devel gave me a hint:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2008-March/025226.html

As far as I undestand, in gnome-sound-preferences the Pulseaudio server should be selected instead of the desired playback device, which I did before. After setting everything to pulseaudio, all sounds from any applications where played by the secondary card, so now I had to find away to convince Pulseaudio to choose the Intel card instead. What helped here was

- editing /etc/pulse/default.pa
- uncommenting the line 'set-default-sink' and adding the name of the Intel card instead of 'output'

So sound is working now properly, but to me it seems that this is a regression compared to previous versions of Ubuntu, since there is no easy and obvious way to select the default sound card anymore, if you have more than one sound devices.

Kind regards,
Jan

pavucontrol ("Volume Control" in the padevchooser applet) is used for this.

Thanks, this also worked for me after I restarted my system.

So I am not sure if one could consider this actually a bug but rather a missing feature (since pavucontrol isn't installed by default).

Kind regards,
Jan

So I'm late to the party but for posterity's sake, I fixed this by adding

option snd_hda_intel index=-2

(where snd_hda_intel is the name of my internal sound card, which I want to use for capture but not for playback) to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base, and commenting out the similar line which applied to my USB sound device.

Jan, you mentioned that you'd tried giving the new soundcard a lower priority, so maybe this didn't work for you but I thought I should record it here just in case.

Cheers,
 Owen