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If you have multiple soundcards in your system and have to switch between them regularly (e.g. laptop owners like me, who use an external soundcard while being docked to groove to the highest and the lowest of frequencies through those 7.1 channels and use the in-built sound card while on the move) you would definitely be under-whelmed by the less-than-stellar performance of ubuntu in switching between the sound cards. For me at least, ubuntu (fiesty 7.04 amd64) never seems to recognize that I’ve connected the speakers to my Audigy 2 ZS Notebook PCMCIA card, and merrily continues to huff-puff through the tinny laptop speakers until I manually go into the sound preferences, switch over to multichannel playback and vice versa. Well, I still haven’t found an automated solution for the switching, but here is a little cli-magic to do this in a click.
If you have alsa on ur system, just use the command “asoundconf list” first to list out all the soundcards connected to your system. e.g. on my system, the output is
$asoundconf list
IXP
AUDIGY2
Here, IXP is my internal sound card and AUDIGY2 is my external (PCMCIA) sound card. Now, all you need to is use “asoundconf set-default-card <cardname>” to switch over to any card desired. So, what I did was make 2 bash scripts, and insert this command in them with each having one of my soundcards’ names.
script 1 – setixp.sh
#!/bin/bash
asoundconf set-default-card IXP
Similarly, script 2 – setaudigy.sh
#!/bin/bash
asoundconf set-default-card AUDIGY2
Now, all that remains is save the two scripts (maybe in ur home directory or ur desktop), and make them executable (use “chmod +x <scriptname>”). Now, whenever you want to switch to a card, just double-click on the appropriate script, and watch the sound getting redirected. oops, make that “hear” the sound :P.
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Quote of the day: “The unplanned organism is a question asked by Nature and answered by Death. You are another kind of question, with another kind of answer.” -Morpheus
February 18th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
An alternative way to do the same in a single script (without prior knowledge of installed cards) would be
#!/bin/bash
oldIFS=${IFS}
IFS=$’\n’
cardList=($(asoundconf list | grep -v “Names of available sound cards”))
IFS=${oldIFS}
if [ ${#cardList[@]} -eq 1 ]
then
echo “The system detedted only 1 audio card”
echo “Press enter to exit”
read
exit 0
fi
echo “Select the AUDIO card to be selected as default”
select card in “${cardList[@]}”
do
if [ -n "${card}" ]
then
echo “Changing default-card to: ${card}”
asoundconf set-default-card ${card}
echo “Press enter to exit”
read
exit $?
else
echo “Please select a valid entry”
fi
done
February 18th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Yeah, that’d be a good and generic approach. But it’d take a click and some typing :). It can be used as it is by someone who just doesn’t want to make his own script.
But, a bit of extra effort (pre-determining the soundcards available) would make it much easier and faster later on (single click switching).