Sound device selection, bug?

[greengnome]

I have an external speaker connected via USB and headphones in the 3.5mm jack. After I boot up the little dot on output device always show the external speaker as selected but actual sound comes from the headphones (I'm right-clicking on the sound icon on the panel to see and change this). If I change it manually it works correctly but I have to select something else first and then the speaker to get sound from it.

I have 5 output devices listed in total (since my speakerless DP monitors are also there). The external speaker happens to be listed on top which could maybe have something to do with why it always gets the dot be default.

Running 20.2

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$ inxi -A
Audio:     Device-1: Intel driver: snd_hda_intel 
           Device-2: Dell type: USB driver: hid-generic,snd-usb-audio,usbhid 
           Sound Server: ALSA v: k5.11.0-36-generic

This seems like a bug to me not displaying the actually used device as active. Is posting here considered a bug report or do we have a bugtracker somewhere else?

[SMG]

This seems like a bug to me not displaying the actually used device as active. Is posting here considered a bug report or do we have a bugtracker somewhere else?

This is a user forum where Mint users help other Mint users, so posting here is not considered a bug report.

Have you installed pavucontrol? It has more options for sound and may be able to help you determine why this is happening.

[greengnome]

Yes I have pavucontrol but have not seen any clue there.
Is there a place to report bugs somewhere?

[SMG]

Is there a place to report bugs somewhere?

There are several places to report bug depending upon who handles that part of the code. Some is Mint, some is Canonical (Ubuntu), and there are others as well. Unfortunately, I do not know which specific part of the code may be causing the issue, so I can not give a recommendation of where to report it. I do not see anything in the Mint repositories (but it is also possible I missed something in my quick review of it).

Maybe someone else will know.

[greengnome]

Makes sense in a way, but I wish this was clearer to users. Just want to help my favourite OS get better by reporting bugs when I see something.

[SMG]

Just want to help my favourite OS get better by reporting bugs when I see something.

And we appreciate that.

I came across this thread yesterday How to improve sound quality which mentioned quite a few different tools which are available related to sound. Maybe something mentioned in that thread might give you some ideas for troubleshooting this issue.

[MrEen]

Hi greengnome,

There can be a few causes for what you are experiencing. The best way for me to get an idea where the issue might be is to see the output of this command:

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curl https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/raw/master/src/utils/pa-info?inline=false | bash | nc termbin.com 9999

Run that right after booting up and playing some sound, then run it again after fixing the issue and playing something again. Paste both URL's that'll be at the bottom of the outputs mentioning which one is which then we can try to troubleshoot what is causing the issue.