Bash script to switch Pulseaudio sinks
Who doesn’t love using the keyboard even for simple things like switching the output (or sink as pulseaudio calls it) for you audio? My setup is a set of external speakers, a monitor with rather bad speakers and plugged into the monitor at all time my headphones. That makes three sinks which makes my script a bit more complicated than a simple toggle to the other (i.e. IDLE sink) would be.
The obvious other use-case for this script is one systems where you don’t have a display.
#!/bin/env sh
# get the names and give each a number
sinks=`pactl list sinks | grep Name | grep -n Name`
# echo with " to get the newlins properly and find which we currently use
current_sink_number=`echo "$sinks" | grep "\$(pactl get-default-sink)" | cut -d: -f 1`
# modulo on current sink + 1
new_sink_number=$((($current_sink_number % `echo "$sinks" | wc -l`) + 1))
# find id of the next sink
new_sink=`echo "$sinks" | sed -En "/$new_sink_number:/ s/.*Name: (.*)/\1/p;"`
pactl set-default-sink $new_sink
# get name of the default sink and make it look pretty
new_sink_name=`pactl list sinks | sed -En " # -n to be quiet, we use print below
N # add the next line
/Name: $(pactl get-default-sink).*Description/{ # match the pair of lines with Name and Description
s/(Stereo|Analog|Digital|Controller).*// # remove some noise
s/.*Description: (.*)/\1/p # match the name and print it
}"`
notify-send "Using sink $new_sink_name"
If your Linux skills are still basic, here’s how to install and use the script:
Put the code into bin/switch-pulseaudio-sink.sh then chmod 700 bin/switch-pulseaudio-sink.sh to make the file executable
and lastly assign it some keyboard shortcut in your desktop manager. In xfce4 I’m using Alt-Shift-S (s for sink) but you might have extra multimedia keys on your keyboard
that you could re-assign with acpi, in that case /etc/acpid/handler.sh is most likely on your system available for this.