Different applications, different sound output devices

Question

I would find it really useful if I could make it so that music I am playing on YouTube in Chrome comes out of speakers, and the sound from other applications comes out of my earphones, so I am wondering if there is a way to get it so that different applications use different sound devices to output? And an easy way of quickly changing which application has which output device assigned to it.

I found another question about this here: Play sound from different applications on different output devices (speakers, headphones) But that question is 2 years old and had no answers, so I decided that I should ask a new question about this.

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OS Information:

Description:    Ubuntu 14.10
Release:    14.10

Solution

It is going to vary with hardware and my guess is that you need 2 separate sound cards or a sound card / mixer capable of such separation.

You can then configure pulseausio to send output to specific locations / cards with pavucontrol , in the playback tab

One may need to install pavucontrol , either with apt-get or from the software center.

sudo apt-get install pavucontrol

If for some reason, pulseaudio will not do this, jack will, but configuring jack can be overwhelming. If you are new to jack, I suggest Cadence, with is a graphical tool provided as a binary

http://kxstudio.sourceforge.net/Downloads

Comments

[Panther]

As commented on that question, pavucontrol should allow you to do this in the output tab (by application). If not, you would have to use jack .

[Panther]

Screenshot - i.stack.imgur.com/gwous.png Assuming that works this comment can be converted to an answer. Configuring jack would be different

[Panther]

Of course, I believe you would need more then one sound card as I doubt the average sound card can do both speakers and head phones with 2 apps at the same time . If you have problems you may need to configure jack and you may need to modify some desktop settings and/or a realtime kernel (although in theory the rt patch is no longer needed).

[Admin]

@bodhi.zazen: I think that the thing about pavucontrol will work, so could you please convert that into an answer.

[bennos]

I can confirm pavucontrol works with speakers over bluetooth and headphones over jack with sound from two different browsers. I have only one soundcard and a bluetooth dongle via USB.

[Paŭlo Ebermann]

Do you by chance know how to set this up for system sounds? (I want those on the speaker, so I don't miss meeting notifications when I don't have my earphones in my ears.)