Showing posts with label speakers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label speakers. Show all posts

2008-11-01

Pulseaudio and speakers+headphones remapping

Just thought I should share my pulseaudio configuration. It allows me to move audio streams between my speakers and my headphones. The drawback is that I had to connect my headphones to the rear-speaker output, effectively stopping any surround usage. The perfect setup would have been if I could instead have used the audio output on the front of my computer (I know this should work as the Realtek utilitiy in Windows is able to do it).

For sanity I just share the relevant parts of my system.pa

#### I do this by hand for the remaps
# ### Automatically load driver modules depending on the hardware available
# .ifexists module-hal-detect.so
# load-module module-hal-detect
# .else
# ### Alternatively use the static hardware detection module (for systems that
# ### lack HAL support)
# load-module module-detect
#.endif

### Automatically suspend sinks/sources that become idle for too long
#load-module module-suspend-on-idle
#bug: http://pulseaudio.org/ticket/326


# Set the speakers as the default device
set-default-sink speakers

# Map device 0 to sound_card (this is my sound card) and use 4 channels
load-module module-alsa-sink sink_name=sound_card device_id=0 channels=4 channel_map=front-left,front-right,rear-left,rear-right

# Map the front channels to the speakers sink
load-module module-remap-sink sink_name=speakers master=sound_card channels=2 master_channel_map=front-left,front-right channel_map=front-left,front-right

# Map the rear channels to the headphones sink
load-module module-remap-sink sink_name=headphones master=sound_card channels=2 master_channel_map=rear-left,rear-right channel_map=front-left,front-right


And here's what I changed in daemon.conf:

;make channel-splitting work (may destroy mono to stereo on mono files)
disable-remixing = yes

default-sample-channels = 4



Unfortunately the sink names are not shown in PulseAudio Volume Control but some trial and error (choosing 1 out of to 2 :P) will tell you which sink is the speakers and which is the headphones.