4 ms·
With PulseAudio, I have 1 singular feature that makes most people wow: When I plug in any new audio device, whatever I'm playing/recording automatically sinks
by kefka 10y ago
With PulseAudio, I have 1 singular feature that makes most people wow:
When I plug in any new audio device, whatever I'm playing/recording automatically sinks to the most recent device. Seamlessly. So if I'm on mail.google.com and a GVoice call comes in, I can take the call, and during the call, plug in my USB headset.
It just works.
Mac can't do that. Windows can't do that. Linux/PulseAudio can. And that kicks ass.
- dijit 10y agoMac absolutely can do that, I'm not sure why you think it can't, perhaps it couldn't in the past. I do it almost daily when I come home and plug in my Bose Companion 5 into my Macbook (USB Speakers)
- kefka 10y agoAdmittedly, it's been quite some time since I last worked on a Mac. Think 10.6.8 era. It could also have been a borked install as well. But I'm sitting in front of a Win10 install on a Surface 4 Pro, and it can't auto-sink audio.
- eridius 10y agoMac can do that, but it's also up to the software. Software can either detect when the default audio device changes, or it can grab the device at startup and never change. Google's software, for example, has demonstrated the latter behavior in the past for me (specifically, Google Hangouts has had a tendency to not notice if I plug in headphones+mic and continues to use the built-in mic instead).
- gman99 10y agoWindows 10 can _definitely_ do that (I do the exact same thing with bluetooth/wired headsets frequently; I'm "fairly" sure I used to do that on Windows 7 too -- I remember being quite amazed when my Ubuntu machine "finally" caught up and was able to do the same thing.) In fact, I quite often start music playing on the laptop (chrome/Google Play Music) and then power up my bluetooth headset -- it initially uses eSCO when it routes the audio over (mono) and then switches to A2DP a few seconds later Maybe the issue is something to do with the SW (chrome/firefox?) you use for GVoice? Or maybe there are some edge cases that I'm not triggering (in particular, a USB headset is effectively a new soundcard and not just an audio sink; I can completely believe windows is flaky with them especially with third party drivers)
- digi_owl 10y agoUSB headsets are a technological abomination. You are talking about a headset welded to a soundcard, that you then insert into a data bus each time you want to use it.
- fridsun 10y agoWindows definitely can do that.