After faffing with headphones and Bluetooth for literally 18 months I realised I could pipe my PC’s audio into the monitor.

Here’s what I ended up doing.

pactl list short sinks

The pactl (which I have been thinking of as ‘pact-al’ when of course it’s ‘p(ulse) a(udio) control’) program lets me talk to a running PulseAudio server. This command lists all the available ‘sinks’ (output devices) in a short format.


so now I can do this: 

```bash
pactl set-card-profile alsa_card.pci-0000_01_00.1 output:hdmi-stereo-extra1

…to switch from whatever was controlling the headphone jack to the HDMI output. See:

joe@joe-main:~$ pactl list short sinks
1 alsa_output.pci-0000_0c_00.6.iec958-stereo  module-alsa-card.c  s16le 2ch 44100Hz SUSPENDED
253 alsa_output.pci-0000_01_00.1.hdmi-stereo  module-alsa-card.c  s16le 2ch 44100Hz RUNNING
joe@joe-main:~$

But not so fast - because now the audio is coming out of the wrong monitor - I have a nice big TV monitor and an old second monitor and the sound is coming out of the wrong one!

So now I have to go into more detail. This command lists all audio cards with detailed information:

pactl list cards

The output is very long but it tells me I have three cards.

  • AMD HD Audio Controller: this is the onboard audio controller integrated with my AMD Ryzen 3 CPU and ASUS motherboard and is presumably what I plug my headphones into on my tower.
  • NVIDIA HDA (High-Definition Audio): This is the audio output provided by my NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 GPU. It handles audio output over HDMI connections. It also tells me which HDMI ports are connected.
  • A third card (AMD Radeon HD Audio Controller): its use is unclear.

Now I can use this command:

pactl set-card-profile alsa_card.pci-0000_01_00.1 output:hdmi-stereo-extra1

To set the correct HDMI output (I got the stereo-extra1 part from listing the cards). I also set the default:

pactl set-default-sink alsa_output.pci-0000_01_00.1.hdmi-stereo-extra1

But that doesn’t appear to survive a reboot. More to do here…