[conspire] no audio to headphone

[Akkana Peck]

Rick Moen writes:
> Heard about "apulse"?  It's a shim atop ALSA that presents to any app
> you "use with" a Pulse Audio software interface.  By "use with", I mean
> do something like "apulse firefox" as a launcher for Firefox.

Good question! I hadn't heard about anything like that when I took the plunge into pulseaudio. I think I first heard about it about halfway through the process, and it sounded intriguing, but by then, I was in "I'm sure this pulse script will work after this one last tweak" (a phase that may last for several days and several hundred last tweaks with no loss of confidence that this one is The One :-) and I never did go back and try removing pulseaudio and seeing if I could still get all my programs to work with a compatibility layer like apulse.

At this point, now that I have pulseaudio working, I'm actually finding its ability to switch among different sources and sinks useful, since I have three possible microphones and two possible sets of speakers. In the pre-Zoom era, I never needed a mic, and the only time I needed a different speaker was once or twice when I gave a planetarium talk and wanted to play sounds over the HDMI link to the projector, and accomplishing that was fairly tricky in ALSA (it involved rewriting ~/.asoundrc, and once switched, it tended to drop the first few seconds of every sound file). Pulse is bad at guessing which source/sink I want to use, but it's pretty good at switching given the right pacmd/pactl commands.

        ...Akkana