Overview

A little while back I switched to using Pop!_OS for my ‘daily driver’ OS of choice on my home PC. I have a bunch of different audio devices connected to my system: display speakers via HDMI, USB sound card, USB headphones etc.

I was finding that I would set my prefered output (usually my display speakers) in the system settings, and then after either reboot or coming out of sleep, Pop!_OS would have selected a different audio device seemingly for no reason.

Looking into this it seems it’s not unusual for the way Pulse Audio is setup, and so doing a bit of digging I found this fix.

NOTE! :
This was only tested on Pop!_OS 21.10. I have yet to test it on 22.04 (or later) as my audio setup changed so I had no need for this anymore!

Fix

I found a post on Reddit with some information on this.

Steps

• sudo gedit /etc/pulse/default.pa
• Comment out: load-module module-switch-on-connect
• Comment out: load-module module-switch-on-port-available
• Reboot.

From this point on, I have (so far) not had any issues with my device changing. However, I would say that disabling these settings does mean that audio won’t be switched automatically when a new device is plugged in (say some headphones) and for some people that might be frustrating!