[Sussex] USB Speakers

[Jan Henkins]

Hello Steve,

On Thu, July 21, 2011 12:41, Steve Dobson wrote:

> Many thanks for your suggestion.  I didn't know of PulseAudio and I will
> have to check it out.  As I use Debian it's only a quick "apt-get install"
> away.

Hmm, doesn't Debian also use PulseAudio by default these days? I know that
Fedora and Ubuntu does. Anyway, do the following to see what you have
available to install:

$ apt-cache search pulseaudio

> Out of interest, what happen if you try playing sound (music or video)
> when you don't have your Lindy USB sound device plugged in?  I haven't
> tried that out yet on this this netbook.

On my Lenovo it works through the built-in speakers. In this case it's not
all that bad, the IdeaPad Z300 series have relatively good audio from a
playback perspective. Unfortunately ALSA, and therefore PulseAudio, does
not see the built-in microphone on this particular motherboard, so I only
use the Lindy when I need to do VoIP. The default Ubuntu Natty behaviour
is to leave the current default audio devices as-is, so the only way for
me to change things would be to adjust the audio device "order of
preference". KDE has a Multimedia applet that controls Gstreamer, which in
turn affects the way the PulseAudio daemon uses your audio devices. I seem
to remember that it was actually a lot easier to do the same under Gnome2,
so you should be OK.


-- 
Regards,
Jan Henkins