Simultaneous output with paprefs no more working on ubuntu 13.04

Question

I was using at the same HDMI audio output and laptop built-in speakers, by means of a virtual output device created by paprefs. This was working on 12.10 and no more on 13.04. On 13.04, the 'virtual device' only activates the last selected actual output device. My laptop is DELL XPS 14.

Any suggestion?

thanks! pier

Answer 1

Paprefs

We can not confirm a malfunction of the simutaneous output in our setup on 13.04.. We can successfully add a combined output sink from all available sinks by following the answer to this question:

• Analog and digital audio output at the same time

Please make sure the pulseaudio module module-combine-sink was loaded appropriately after we had selected it from paprefs. This may need a restart of the sound server with

pulseaudio -k

in a terminal or by log out and log back in to our session.

We can then see that the module was loaded from an additional output sink "Simultaneous output to..." in our sound settings. Alternatively we can issue the following command to see all loaded modules:

pacmd list-modules

Command line

Other than with paprefs we can manually combine sinks for playback. This may also be needed in case we had more than two sinks but only need some of them to be combined.

1. Find out the names of available sinks

   pacmd list-sinks
   

2. Combine two sinks

   pacmd load-module module-combine-sink sink_name=combine sink_properties=device.description=myCombine slaves=sink1,sink2[,...] channels=2
   

Answer 2

I tried to follow your suggestion without success. Probably I don't understand how to use sink names.

I was able to restore simultaneous audio output following these italian suggestions from archlinux.org.

I put the folloing lines in /etc/pulse/default.pa:

load-module module-alsa-sink device="hw:0,0" sink_name=analog_output
load-module module-alsa-sink device="hw:0,3" sink_name=digital_output
load-module module-combine sink_name=analog_digital slaves=digital_output,analog_output  

And new "Simultaneous output" entry in sound control now works.
The only (minor) problem is that now I see also 2 new entries in the sound
control, again referring to the analog and hdmi output, both called 'Built-in audio'...