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ValveSoftware / SteamOS

SteamOS community tracker
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Soundstream switch on a fly #188

Open tarvitz opened 10 years ago

tarvitz commented 10 years ago

Pulseaudio driven sound environment allows to switch sound stream between separate sound cards. It would be nice to have possibility to switch streams that have been already run between these audio cards.

For example, I have two cards and headphones/sound speakers system connected to them (separate each other). While I play dota 2 or something that demands me to use microphone and voice with my friends/team I switch output sound stream to one audio card (headphones). While I do nothing and listen to the music/watch youtube and so on I prefer to listen to it with sound system (another sound card).

SteamOS currently have an issue. There's possibility to have this task works well before sound stream was initiated. For example if I run browser and watch something I would have sound in headphones, but if I would switch to sound system (another sound card) there's no sound switch would happen (e.g no sound in sound system, still in the headphones).

I know there's no issue in Windows 7, Ubuntu (since 13.04-13.10) you can freely switch sound devices and switch sound streams on a fly.

Switching sound steams with help of pacmd in console would be pretty uncomfortable for linux non-experienced users.

tarvitz commented 10 years ago

By the way, pavucontrol (installed through debian wheezy distro) solves this issue

joshmhanson commented 8 years ago

I want to add that for basic usability it is really critical to to have the ability to switch the sound output device while in-game. PulseAudio allows this, it just needs to be exposed through the SteamOS BPM interface.

This would be an acceptable compromise if it were not possible to have the sound automatically switch to headset as soon as one is plugged in, which might be difficult to implement.

tarvitz commented 8 years ago

@HanJiexi :+1: , it'd be nice