Configuring sound output on Lubuntu 14.4

[farinet at arcor.de]

On Wed, 19 Nov 2014 01:25:55 +0000
Aere Greenway <Aere at Dvorak-Keyboards.com> wrote:

> Walter, and All:
> 
> Working with MIDI Music applications, I start (on Lubuntu) by installing 
> pulseaudio and pavucontrol.
> 
> Part of the reason I do this, is the Java Sound (Gervill) Synthesizer 
> assumes if the distribution is an Ubuntu variant, PulseAudio is the 
> sound system to use.
> 
> Pavucontrol lets me specify which (of the often multiple sound cards) is 
> the one connected to my amplifier.  I have successfully used a USB audio 
> device with pulseaudio and pavucontrol.
> 
> I also use JACK (qjackctl), which is extremely useful.  But beware, 
> PulseAudio and JACK are like 'mortal enemies'.  Trying to use both at 
> the same time used to hang your system to where your only solution was 
> to turn the power off.  Fortunately, newer system levels have sorted 
> things out to where the system doesn't hang, but you can't use JACK and 
> PulseAudio at the same time.
> 
> Well, actually, there is a way to do it.  By manually making 
> configuration changes it can be done (a person on this e-mail list 
> showed me how).  But as with so many things done by manually editing 
> configuration files, it went away with the next system level, and I 
> forgot how to do it, so I just live with not using JACK and PulseAudio 
> at the same time.

I agree pretty much on all this. On a amd-based laptop in pure alsa i was unable to figure out why - and how - hdmi always was the first (and default) sound card; with the obvious result there was no sound output in many applications. Only vlc worked because of its very detailed onfiguration options.

But no sound in browser, mplayer etc. etc. With pulseaudio and pavucontrol i could sort that out. Indeed, a coherent sound settings manager (like network-manager or so) would be really very very nice!

Cheers.