[arch-general] Muting internal speakers

[Oon-Ee Ng]

On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 5:04 PM, Heiko Baums <lists at baums-on-web.de> wrote:
> Am Fri, 15 Jun 2012 10:17:45 +0300
> schrieb Chris Sakalis <chrissakalis at 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.