Situation:
I play music through an external USB unit to speakers.
Default audio device: the monitor, so that system sounds (and webpages ...) play through monitor speakers.
Computer inactive -> monitor sleeps.
Whatever sounds will play through USB and speakers until monitor awakes.
How to fix? There is an "onboard" audio device that I do not use, and I had hoped to be able to select that as the fallback.
Could you use an audio player that uses WASAPI to prevent any other programs from using the USB audio?
The other way would be to set the monitor as default audio device and then switch over to a VGA\DVI input and unplug the DP\HDMI input so the monitors audio devices are gone, then set the onboard audio as the default audio device. When the DP\HDMI is reconnected it should go back to being the default audio device and when the monitor switches off it should fall back to the onboard audio.
hopefully this would work since i can't really test it.
Could you use an audio player that uses WASAPI to prevent any other programs from using the USB audio?
Spotify cannot.
The whole truth is a bit more complicated: there is one more audio device, that Foobar2000 controls exclusively. But because that device is not the issue, I left it out of the original posting. But this is also the explanation why I generally live with this - most of the time, the source selector gets the fb2k output, and the wake-up beeps go to the unselected device.
But the USB device keeps showing up on top ...
What do you mean by showing up on the top, the playback devices are sorted alphabetically on device name.
What do you mean by showing up on the top, the playback devices are sorted alphabetically on device name.
Oh. Well. There is something strange going on. See the screenshot: Windows assigns a number, and then it shows up on top.
But now I plugged the devices around just to test, the old MD-Port actually works (it usually does not, after these years ...), so I'll check if that makes a change.
The order in the list is not the priority, it's how you set them as default device.
e.g. (from your screenshot)
The realtek is currently the default audio device
Make the 5-MD-PORT DG2 the default audio device
Unplug the 5-MD-PORT DG2 and the default audio device should switch back to the realtek since the 5-MD-PORT DG2 doesn't exist anymore