On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 5:04 PM, Heiko Baums <lists@baums-on-web.de> wrote:
Am Fri, 15 Jun 2012 10:17:45 +0300 schrieb Chris Sakalis <chrissakalis@gmail.com>:
Hello, pulseaudio[1] has that functionality. You should check it out. On KDE , Kmix supports pulseaudio and I am pretty sure it support auto switching too.
PulseAudio is more or less crap. It still doesn't support (semi-)professional audio cards.
If you don't really need it's super-duper extra functions like gaplessly moving a stream from one sound card to another you better don't bother with PA. It rather makes things worse than better.
Yes, why not repeat that opinion in every thread where pulse is brought up? Its not like its repetitive.
I don't have a solution for the original question, because I don't use two sound cards at the same time, but there are other and better ways to disable the internal notebook speakers.
Usually you can choose in every application which sound card to be used (sometimes in it's config files). I guess there are software mixers for every desktop environment which let you choose the sound card, which shall be used.
Which sounds an awful lot like slimmed-down pulseaudio to me. At the OP - pulseaudio may (or may not) help in your situation. The 'default' device is not the same as a Windows default device in the sense that currently playing streams will not be automatically moved. I use a script to do that (change default device and move all streams, I think I may even have posted it up on the pulse wiki), but (AFAIK) there aren't any 'hooks' for activating such scripts within pulseaudio when a new card is detected. Not sure if udev can do that, I just press a shortcut to run the script when I plug in my external headphones/sound card.