# Using pulseaudio



## joplass (Aug 19, 2021)

Hello good people of the forum, 

I want to move to pulseaudio because I want to be able to switch to the HDMI output with pavucontrol. I installed pulseaudio, alsa-utils, and pavucontrol. Pavucontrol does not seem to find any audio hardware. Is there something else I need to do?

Thanks.


----------



## Alexander88207 (Aug 19, 2021)

Hello,

do you have already tried to switch to your HDMI output using `cat /dev/sndstat` for list the devices and `sysctl hw.snd.default_unit=` for switching to them?

Example usage:

`cat /dev/sndstat`


```
Installed devices:
pcm0: <ATI R6xx (HDMI)> (play)
pcm1: <USB audio> (play/rec) default
```

`sysctl hw.snd.default_unit=0`

`cat /dev/sndstat`


```
Installed devices:
pcm0: <ATI R6xx (HDMI)> (play) default
pcm1: <USB audio> (play/rec)
```


----------



## cmoerz (Aug 19, 2021)

What do you get when you run `pactl info`?


----------



## joplass (Aug 19, 2021)

Yes, I can do all that and it works. I have other people who can't deal with the terminal so I thought maybe pavucontrol could help.


----------



## Alexander88207 (Aug 19, 2021)

joplass said:


> I have other people who can't deal with the terminal so I thought maybe pavucontrol could help.



If this is the reason why pulseaudio is used, then I recommend programs that use FreeBSD's basic sound system (OSS) such as audio/fossmixer or audio/mixertui

You can find more mixers in this thread: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/mixer-application.77153


----------



## joplass (Aug 21, 2021)

Thank you.  I will get to work.

What I thought could help was gtk-mixer unfortunately it could not switch to HDMI for me.


----------

