Whilst using XFCE, I have missed the functionality to select the ALSA default sound card. In GNOME Ubuntu, this is easy through System->Preferences->Sound. Select the card, and it runs asoundconf set-default-card <card>. Done.
In XFCE, there is no such functionality. I felt the desire to have that, and also motivation to get that working. I took it upon myself to learn Python, and I did just about. I wrote my applet so that it would also fill a deficiency in the GNOME Sound Properties applet: when you have ejected a card, it is still active, and there is no way to remedy that. My applet runs asoundconf on quit, so that it makes sure the card selected is the correct one. (And writing that, I've just thought of where it could be buggy... but I'll need to test that...)
Now, I keep referring to asoundconf. I designed my applet to be multi-platform, so that it could run on non-Debian based distributions. This would be hard with a dependency on asoundconf. Fortunately, asoundconf is also in Python, so (thanks to the GPL), I've stolen quite a few functions from that. Now, my applet will run anywhere with PyGTK and ALSA.
To run the applet, you will need to copy and paste it into a text file, and mark that as executable. You can get it here: http://tibsplace.co.uk/asoundconf-gtk
If you want an easy way to get it: "wget http://tibsplace.co.uk/asoundconf-gtk && chmod +x asoundconf-gtk"
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