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I would find it really useful if I could make it so that music I am playing on YouTube in Chrome comes out of speakers, and the sound from other applications comes out of my earphones, so I am wondering if there is a way to get it so that different applications use different sound devices to output? And an easy way of quickly changing which application has which output device assigned to it.

I found another question about this here: Play sound from different applications on different output devices (speakers, headphones) But that question is 2 years old and had no answers, so I decided that I should ask a new question about this.

OS Information:

Description:    Ubuntu 14.10
Release:    14.10
Community
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  • As commented on that question, pavucontrol should allow you to do this in the output tab (by application). If not, you would have to use jack . – Panther Apr 14 '15 at 18:46
  • Screenshot - https://i.sstatic.net/gwous.png Assuming that works this comment can be converted to an answer. Configuring jack would be different – Panther Apr 14 '15 at 18:48
  • Of course, I believe you would need more then one sound card as I doubt the average sound card can do both speakers and head phones with 2 apps at the same time . If you have problems you may need to configure jack and you may need to modify some desktop settings and/or a realtime kernel (although in theory the rt patch is no longer needed). – Panther Apr 14 '15 at 18:50
  • @bodhi.zazen: I think that the thing about pavucontrol will work, so could you please convert that into an answer. –  Apr 14 '15 at 19:00

1 Answers1

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It is going to vary with hardware and my guess is that you need 2 separate sound cards or a sound card / mixer capable of such separation.

You can then configure pulseausio to send output to specific locations / cards with pavucontrol , in the playback tab

pavucontrol

One may need to install pavucontrol , either with apt-get or from the software center.

sudo apt-get install pavucontrol

If for some reason, pulseaudio will not do this, jack will, but configuring jack can be overwhelming. If you are new to jack, I suggest Cadence, with is a graphical tool provided as a binary

http://kxstudio.sourceforge.net/Downloads

Panther
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  • I can confirm pavucontrol works with speakers over bluetooth and headphones over jack with sound from two different browsers. I have only one soundcard and a bluetooth dongle via USB. – bennos Nov 10 '16 at 14:51
  • Do you by chance know how to set this up for system sounds? (I want those on the speaker, so I don't miss meeting notifications when I don't have my earphones in my ears.) – Paŭlo Ebermann Oct 20 '21 at 11:32
  • This works for me without multiple soundcards. Same as @bennos. @Paŭlo Ebermann You could just set your desired output device for the system in gnome-settings then change the output device for the audio app/browser in pavucontrol – gannex Sep 06 '23 at 22:31