Changing\Switching Audio Devices on the Fly

English Hardware
1

Hi,

How can I change my audio output (and input) from one device to another?

(Using a Sound Blaster and USB Headphones)

Changing settings in Phonon is a hassle, and it still won’t change the sound immediately for the apps… Is there a quick way to just disable one device and enable the other, without having to restart the apps that use them?
(For instance, right now Skype and my browser are outputting to headphones and amarok to my speakers - one enabled device that receives everything, bang! output for everything to another device and the first device is having a nap)

I can’t see any settings in KMix to facilitate such a change…

Any ideas on what I can do to change sound cards quickly and easily?

I recall doing this in seconds in Ubuntu via their mixer, so would it be similar if I ditched KDE in favor of Gnome??

Cheers,
Koz

OpenSuse 11.3 x86_64 KDE 4.4.4

2

Hi,

Are you using Pulse Audio ? If i am correct, you can do this with Pulse Audio, not easily with ALSA. In fact, Pulse Audio is designed to do such things.

3

And Gnome uses PulseAudio by default in 11.3, whereas KDE doesn’t.

4

Thanks DaaX and consused.

I guess I am not running pulse audio, however when I try to install it I get the following error:

Problem: patterns-openSUSE-kde4_pure-11.3-22.1.x86_64 conflicts with pulseaudio provided by pulseaudio-0.9.21-10.1.1.x86_64
 Solution 1: deinstallation of patterns-openSUSE-kde4_pure-11.3-22.1.x86_64
 Solution 2: do not install pulseaudio-0.9.21-10.1.1.x86_64

If I go through with this, what will I end up breaking?