How does Mycroft or the news skill choose an audio output device? Running Picroft on a Pi4 hooked up to a Nexdock for video, audio, and keyboard with a Respeaker 4 mic hat for the microphone. Mycroft’s voice works fine and is routed through the HDMI output to the Nexdock speakers. When I initially installed Picroft, the audio for the news skill was played through HDMI to the Nexdock speaker as well. After about a week, somehow, possibly an update, Mycroft managed to pick up a Chromecast device on my network and chose to play the news skill audio through it. (Pleasently surprised!) However, I would like to have the news skill audio output to the HDMI output again. I’ve checked the alsamixer and the default audio device is set to HDMI, and as I said, Mycroft’s voice is played over the HDMI output. So there must be a separate setting somewhere to change the news skill output. I’m fairly new to Linux and Picroft, but also fairly technically minded. Just need some help knowing where to look. Thanks for any and all advice.
I’ve managed to get the audio to play through the HDMI output again by installing VLC. I looked at the audio log and saw that Mycroft was searching for a playback device for the news stream. I assumed that there was a player installed that could handle the news stream since it was working initially. Not sure what happened to that made Mycroft forget what is installed on the system. Not sure where to even look. But looking through the audio log, it listed the players it was looking for. Picked VLC (since I’ve used it before on Windows, not sure it was the best choice), and everything was back to normal. I might try mplayer at some point, since it was listed as well. Hopefully, this helps someone else out that might be experiencing the same issue. If anyone knows (just out of curiosity), what would the default player have been on a clean install of Picroft and why would it stop being recognized? Don’t think I messed with anything after installing the Respeaker 4 mic hat? I know it worked after that for several days.
I’m in a similar situation, however, since my Pi is headless I went the mplayer route. For some reason, the news is now playing on a Chromecast device rather than the local sink.
I decided to remove mplayer and went with VLC:
$ sudo apt install vlc-bin
$ sudo apt install vlc-plugin-base
It no longer plays on my chomecast and the news now plays on the local speaker plugged into the headphone jack.