Hello,

I have the following situation: I use a surround sound system that sounds great. However, I usually do not keep the amplifier on all the time. This results in no notification sound when it is switched off. My monitor on the other hand has integrated speakers that would perfect for this usecase.

What I want to do is use the integrated speakers for system notifications and the surround system for everything else. The problem is that the computer is unable to detect if either of those devices is switched on or off.

Is there a convenient way to route the notifications sound to the non default audio device?

Thanks in advance...

Hi!

You can use PulseAudio for it (`pavucontrol`). I do not exactly know how to route sinks there as I am using Jack (another sound server with much more options) but it should be possible to easily switch the output devices per application. The notifications have an own playback stream.

There is an image and some information on askUbuntu

Thank you for your reply. I looked into Pavucontrol, but it does not allow me to change the output device for system sounds. It can do that with other applications, but not system sounds, as can be seen in the screenshot (presuming that I figure out how to attach one to this post). The button to change the output device (which does appear and works on other applications) is not there for System sounds. Am I missing something?

I don't think that there are missing some plugins or similar. Perhaps it is just not that easy to configure via GUI. Have a look at PulseAudio Examples. You can play around using `pacmd` which provides a shell if called without arguments.
At first check the available options with list-cards (same as `aplay -l`), list-sinks, etc.

As an alternative you can try Jack as there are plenty of tools for it, but a lot to read as its main usage is for audio production.