On Wed, 2016-10-26 at 18:47 +0200, pfl wrote: > thanks for the infos, I am gonna check this now > > btw do you have any web page where everything is explained ? sources, > sinks, monitors, profiles.... all these I think this kind of overview is missing. We really should document the basics properly... I'll try to give a short summary (for simplicity I'll limit the explanations to alsa hardware): Card: A sound card as defined by alsa. There's one-to-one mapping between cards in pulseaudio and cards in alsa. Sink: An output device. This corresponds to PCM devices in alsa. Source: An input device. This corresponds to PCM devices in alsa. Port: A sink or source may have multiple routing options, and these options are represented by ports. A typical example is an integrated sound card on a laptop that provides outputs for the integrated speaker and the headphone jack. There's only one PCM device, but with mixer settings the hardware can be configured to use either the speaker or the headphone output. So the sink in pulseaudio has two ports: one for speakers and one for headphones. Only one port can be active on a sink at a time. Profile: A card often has multiple profiles. Only one profile can be active at a time. The selected profile defines which sinks and sources should be made available. For example, the current profile on my laptop's integrated sound card is output:analog-stereo+input:analog- stereo, which creates one stereo sink and one stereo source for the analog output and input. A different profile could for example create a surround sink instead of stereo (not available on my laptop, though). -- Tanu
