Xubuntu: No (good) way to switch audio to USB headphones

Asked by Charles

I have some USB headphones that I use regularly with my computer. I would like them to behave like normal headphones wherein when you plug them in, all audio is directed to them instead of the speakers plugged into my motherboard. Kubuntu handles this very well. Ubuntu-MATE is not so automatic, you have to pick the sound output device via the speaker icon. Xubuntu, however, simply appears to have no way at all to do this.

The closest I've gotten so far is:

1. Click on the speaker icon in the panel
2. Select "Sound Settings", this opens a window called "Volume Control"
3. Click on the Playback tab
4. Play audio through some application
5. Select the output device _for that application_

The caveats with this are:

1. It's annoying to do because you have to actually run the audio-emitting application first, then go through the trouble of
2. I can only direct audio to the USB headphones _per application_, there is literally no setting anywhere that lets me send _all_ audio to the USB headphones.

I highly suspect that this is not just an issue for USB headphones, but _all_ hot-plugable audio devices. At one point, I tried various udev/pulseaudio workarounds that I found by googling but none of them worked. This is important enough to me that I'm willing to work with an actual developer on this. I'm even happy to send hardware to them. I've been a Linux sysadmin for well over a decade but most of the desktop technologies elude me.

Two other offtopic side notes that I don't actually expect an answer on:

1. This feels like a bug (or at least a good candidate for a feature request) but I was completely unable to find anything that looked like a bug tracker on the xubuntu.org website.
2. I tried to post this in the Ubuntu Forums, which I have an account for but something was changed at some point and now I can't log in. And the "lost password" link literally does nothing. And there's no way to contact anyone about forum problems without having a forum account.

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Charles
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Charles (bityard) said :
#1

I'm not sure how I missed it in all my searching before, but this achieves what I'm after:

Create ~/.config/pulse/default.pa with:

.include /etc/pulse/default.pa
load-module module-switch-on-connect

Restart pulseuadio:

pulseaudio -k

I don't know why this isn't either exposed in the GUI or just loaded by default. I didn't think USB sound devices were *that* uncommon.