Switching audio output devices for OpenAL based software

When playing a few rounds of Talos Principle, I realized I cannot get the sound output to my USB headphones. Selecting a different sink never worked. It was only in a forum post that I found the answer. Put the following into ~/.alsoftrc

[pulse]
allow-moves=true

and all will be fine. Quoting from the forum post

Recent versions of OpenAL default to disallow pulse streams from being moved.

Thanks!

7 Responses

  1. Frans says:

    Wow, thanks! I have yet to try this solution, but I noticed that in Broken Sword 5 I can only get the sound to a specific output if I set it as the default before starting the game. Which feels really, really weird, because every (?) other program on my system allows me to switch things around however I want.

  2. Daniel says:

    Wow, thanks for that tip. I struggled with this behavior for ages when playing 0ad (https://play0ad.com/). It’d never occured to me that this could be caused by a simple setting.

  1. 2020/02/26

    […] lifted from Norbert Preining in case I forget. I still haven’t actually continued Broken Sword 5 past the first few rooms, […]

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