Re: sound with Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW

On Sat, 16 Feb 2008 14:44:59 +0100
Richard Lyons <richard@the-place.net> wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 16, 2008 at 03:46:21PM +0800, Clayton wrote:
>
> > <snip>

> > To solve most of my sound card headaches I bought a pair of USB
> > headphones, and a pair of high-quality USB speakers. I have also
> > found that if I blacklist the module for the internal sound card,
> > when I plug in a USB sound device it becomes the one and only
> > default sound device, and almost all software talks to it just
> > fine. (Getting some software to talk to a USB sound card in the
> > second position is non-trivial....)
>
> Now that is an interesting idea -- walk round the problem. Thanks for
> that thought. What software has problems with this, though?

With a USB sound card as the only card in default position, I only have had a smallish problem with mplayer that the packager should have fixed in the next version of mplayer that comes down the pipe.

With the onboard sound card driver loaded and the USB sound card in the second position, you have to explicitly tell your sound application to talk to the second ALSA device instead of the first one. I never did figure out how to do this with mplayer, and I seem to recall that VLC might have been an issue as well. Skype, xine and mpg123 were not problems. In the end it just seems easier to blacklist the internal card driver unless I want it. (Which, in the case of the crappy speaker that comes with the Thinkpad X20, is rarely.)

Clayton

<aside>This is one of the things that Windows got right: when you plug in a USB sound device, it automatically becomes the system default for sound playback. To me this seems to be logical and desireable behavior, but is not what happens with Linux.</aside>

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