Minecraft Forums

Hi all,

I can't seem to get Minecraft's sounds to come out of my USB headset on one of my Linux PCs. The PC is configured to use the USB headset as the default sound device (in ALSA), and it works fine for everything else on the PC; watching local videos, sound in web browsers, system notification sounds, etc. However, Minecraft seems to insist on playing the audio through the sound card, rather than the USB headset.

Does anyone know what Minecraft uses for sound on Linux? I assume since it uses LWJGL, that the sound come out through OpenAL, but when I use an OpenAL config file that tells it to use the default ALSA device, it still comes out the speakers.

Can anyone assist?

I was pretty sure I had already done that, but I've done it again just to be sure. No change in audio output.

Anyone with any ideas? Is this a Minecraft problem? An LWJGL problem? An OpenAL problem? Should I be looking from support from the LWJGL or OpenAL developers instead of here?

I have the same problem on Ubuntu 12.10 64bit. I tried changing the playback device for java using pulseaudio volume control, but it does not let me.

I've finally found the answer to this. Turns out most of the posts about the OpenAL config were old and wrong. This post led me to the answer:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-855526-start-0.html

Doing a "bzcat /usr/share/openal-*/alsoftrc.sample.bz2 | less" gave me the syntax of the correct config file. Using this config in ~/.alsoftrc has resulted in Minecraft sound coming out my USB headset (set as the "default" device in ALSA):

[general]
channels = stereo
drivers = alsa

[alsa]
capture = default
device = default