I have (built-in) HDMI audio and built-in analog audio on the motherboard. Both work. I've set phonon device preferences so that notifications prefer HDMI over analog. This USED TO work, but now it doesn't. All notifications are passed through analog. I was hoping that when a notification makes a sound, it would show up in pavucontrol and I could manually move the stream to analog. But notification sounds do not show up in pavucontrol.

Is there any fix for this? It would be nice to hear when skype calls, emails, etc. come in through the monitor, while all else (music, etc.) pipes through my headphones.

Can you verify that the device preferences list for each category is still correct?

Also, what happens if you force a music player to move to the HDMI device? Does that work?
(You should be able to do this through either KMix or pavucontrol).

The preference list is still the same--it's being remembered each session. I can also move streams to the HDMI device using pavucontrol without issue. (There is a known kmix bug which causes it to crash when moving streams.)

I haven't changed any of my audio settings, as far as I'm aware. Strange that it worked and now it doesn't, everything else remaining the same.

Can you setup a new user and see if it works properly there?

I logged into guest, set HDMI as the top preference, and it works as expected. Perhaps I should wipe my pavucontrol/pulseaudio config files? I notice it remembers which channel a particular stream was last on. How might I go about doing that?

Pulseaudio stores it's configuration at ~/.pulseaudio/ and a authentication cookie at ~/.pulse-cookie.
Make sure to remove both while no 'pulseaudio' processes are running.

Removing the folder ~/.pulseaudio and the file ~/.pulse-cookie worked. For others, I killed pulseaudio using "pulseaudio --kill", and then logged out and back in (though perhaps just "pulseaudio --start" would've worked).

Still curious as to what caused this, so that I don't have to keep doing this.

It may be worth checking to see if your distribution has any Pulseaudio updates available.

You may want to keep a list of the output of "pactl list" to compare when it is working and when it stops working. I suspect a certain crucial module is not being loaded (possibly because Pulseaudio is being started automatically rather than as part of your login process).

The module in question is "module-device-manager" with the arguments "do_routing=1". You can load it by running:

Code: Select all

pactl load-module module-device-manager "do_routing=1"

Thanks again for all your help. I'll try these things out if it stops working again.