[Hardware] Adjusting volume for different devices can be cumbersome

[JoshiFresa]

Hi. There's something that I could not figure out fast and it's the way the Audio Controllers work, coming from Windows. Not that it's very different but I still don't find an easy way to shift from one device to another easily and I wonder also if there's a way the system could figure it out automatically?

To explain better. If for example I open bluetooth to listen to music on an external loudspeaker. I got the connection but not the sound. Then I found out that if I go to the Audio Settings I can find an exhaustive list of devices that I can connect manually, et voila, the sound was back. Then when I just want to look at some video on Youtube, I thought I would just have to watch it and the sound would automatically shift to the new device. But one has to do the same, go to the settings again, not so easily accessible, and find the right device. In this case it's worse because there are many many devices with different numbers that don't remind me of any known company, like GA107 High Definition Audio controller 000. Others are named Tiger Lake and I have to try different ones to manage to find which one is correct for the system. I'm sure there must be some simpler way to deal with this and not have to switch from one setting to another all the time. Hopefully I missed something in the general Audio settings. What could it be? Thanks in advance for your help

[Schwarzer Kater]

It's not that different from Windows (please note that my panel is a top panel - things are mirrored compared to your default bottom panel):

[claydoh]

Using that 'advanced' setting is usually a one time deal, the options available depend on the device.

Just left-click the systray icon to switch audio devices.


Here is mine, with two USB devices (speakers and wired headset), the motherboard's sound chip, my Intel Arc GPU's HDMI audio, and one of my BT headsets just to make it more fun. And I hid the AMD cpu/APU's HDMI audio since I don't use that, and it is just too darn many.

[barfly]

Here are my audio settings, I have still to work out how to do simultaneous output of my btooth headphones with my home theatre amp so I don't deafen the lovely Jane watching the same programme.

[JoshiFresa]

Thanks everyone,

So if I understand well, there is no way to get the Audio controllers to switch automatically when I use either Bluetooth, Haruna or Youtube. But it helps that I don't have to open settings to do so. I thought I had to go to the settings because I didn't notice the applications tab of the sound panel. Who doesn't like less clicks to do? I just wondered why there were so many devices to choose from, most of them not in function. In my sound panel I don't lie if I had double of what I see now. Only for the "GA107 High definition Audio Controllers" for example here were like 19 different versions of it! It was so strange. For some reason this amount grew down to a more reasonable list but most don't associate with anything. Not criticizing Linux by the way, but rather describing my subjective experience anecdotically. There's a reason for everything but it takes time to get into it, and that's what I like in Linux personally. It made me feel dumb a few times but afterwards with a feeling of "Eureka!"