Select sound card with console commands

Question

Is it possible to use cinnamon-settings app in the command line to change the default sound card? The default sound card does not seem to be set in dconf.
I'm trying to write a script that switches between HDMI and analog sound output.

Answer 1

I think that you are looking for

pacmd set-default-sink <sink_name|index>

as outlined in https://askubuntu.com/questions/690711/change-sound-output-from-command-line and https://askubuntu.com/questions/14077/how-can-i-change-the-default-audio-device-from-command-line

You can get the available index with

pacmd list-sinks|grep index|awk '{print $NF}'

If you want to control the volume you can do that on the commandline with alsamixer (ncurses) or amixer.

If you are going to play with pulseaudio settings then

cp -i /etc/pulse/default.pa ~/.config/pulse/

will give you your own copy that is safer to edit

pulseaudio -k  #should restart pulseaudio after you change settings.

For your script you may want to check that the available audio rates are compatible with your sink-device:

grep rates $(grep -ci hdmi /proc/asound/card*/codec#0|grep -v :0|sed 's,:.$,,'|head -n1)

and depending on which profile each card is attached to

pactl --server "unix:/run/user/$(id -u)/pulse/native"  set-card-profile 1 output:analog-stereo

and

pactl --server "unix:/run/user/$(id -u)/pulse/native"  set-card-profile 0 output:hdmi-stereo

may help create useful variables. It looks like someone has already tried to do what you are doing:

But some of their variables are either archlinux specific or out-of-date. (Though their path to triggering your script may be of help.)