Mate-volume-control doesn't switch audio streams when changing output device

Support & Help Requests
#1

Hi,

I’m running the Ubuntu Mate 15.10 Beta release, up to date as of today. I started a Youtube audio stream through my laptop’s default speakers, and then plugged in USB headphones and tried to set them as the default output device using mate-volume-control. However, after selecting them, the Youtube audio kept playing through my laptop speakers. It wasn’t until stopping the video and restarting it that the audio came
out the selected USB headphones.

I assumed that mate-volume-control was broken. I’m not sure if this is a limitation or a newly introduced bug? But in Ubuntu (Unity) the default volume control utility switches all active audio streams immediately upon changing the default output device, which I believe should be the behavior of mate-volume-control as well.

Here’s the bug report I filed: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mate/+bug/1497107

Thanks for reading!

1 Like
#2

Thanks for reporting this, I’ll discuss it with the MATE Desltpp team. Can you please also raise this bug on the libmatemixer GitHub issue tracker and cross reference the bugs between LP and GitHub.

It will help having this bug in both so the MATE team have sight of the issue :slight_smile:

#3

Hi @Wimpy, I really appreciate you taking the time to handle this.

Here’s the GitHub bug report:

1 Like
#4

Hi again,

I can confirm that this is a regression compared to Ubuntu Mate 15.04, which correctly switches active audio streams as soon as the output device is changed.

#5

This is an old topic and I am not sure if the bug was ever resolved but this seems to still be an issue in 16.04.
I have a USB headset plugged into my PC. Switching audio output from my PC speakers to my headset is not immediate. For a while I was completely closing out the audio source (YouTube, Google Play Music, SMPlayer, VLC, etc.) and resuming the audio source after changing the output for it to work. I just noticed for the first time that if I waited approximately a minute the output would finally switch over without having to close the source. To me, this seems to still be a problem.
Should I update the bug report? If so, which one?

#6

It’s not resolved yet, and we’d appreciate some help with this since libmatemixer’s sole author and maintainer, Michal Ratajsky, just disappeared some time ago.

#7

Ah OK, thanks for confirming. I’m glad that this isn’t the intended behavior. :slight_smile: I assume this problem isn’t specific to Ubuntu? Mate upstream bug?

#8

Yes, it’s apparently an upstream issue. You can see people from various distros reporting it on github (in the report mentioned above).