Is it possible to automatically switch to HDMI sound output? 13.04

It is not as easy as it looks at first sight to acchieve this. See the discussion below for reasons why it is in fact rather complicated:

• Disucssion on implementing pulseaudio auto-switching of audio devices

The existing modules module-switch-on-connect, and module-switch-on-port-available will not work consistently with HDMI.

At present there is much effort being done to implement a priority list feature which will let us define the priority of an audio device for pulseaudio to route to it (or not):

• Pulseaudio priority routing

Until this will be generally available in a future release of PulseAudio we have not much more choice than manually switching the audio output sink whenever we connect to a HDMI audio device.

To make life easier in case we often have to switch our output devices we may consider writing a small script to enable toggling between two output sinks. See these questions for a start:

• How to change pulseaudio sink with "pacmd set-default-sink" during playback?
• How can I change the default audio device from command line?

I wrote an indicator applet that lets you switch the sound output.

As long as the problem is not solved, this applet is probably a bit more comfortable.

I'm using 12.04. Please let me know if you tried it successfully.

https://github.com/lkettenb/sound-output-switcher

Screentshot: