Arch Linux

integer

Member

From: Toronto, Canada

Registered: 2011-08-22

Posts: 22

Website

Skype audio in minimal environment and jackdmp

Hi folks,

I recently went through a bit of trouble to get
Skype audio working on my system, since ALSA support
has been dropped.

I know this issue has been chewed over a million times,
but I still couldn't find a ready solution for
my set up, so I am writing this in case someone
else finds it useful.

The system running on this Lenovo X230 is very minimalistic,
with DWM being launched with a straight-up startx after,
after console login, manually by yours truly.

The only real relevant line for general info here
from .xinitrc is:

exec dwm 

Pulseaudio was never previously installed on this
system, and I have no intention of using it as a
regular part of my system.  In fact, as I do a bit
of audio work, jackdmp is almost always running.

SO, I wanted a solution which would fire up PA and
connect it to jack ports ONLY while skype is running.
I use the `special user' way of running skype, as
described here:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/skype

Apart from that article, the other source of info for my
solution was the Fedora guide to integrating PA and
jack:
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fed … _JACK.html

Anyway, after installing PA and following the instructions
in the Arch Skype guide, I still was not getting any sound.
After mucking around with pacmd and pactl a bit, it turned out
that while PA was detecting jack, a source and sink were not
being created, moreover, the ALSA hardware was the default sink
even when I loaded the sinks and sources for jack manually.

The hack that I came up with and that works for me at the moment
involves a script to launch PA and skype, as well as some
modification to the ~/.pulse/default.pa file.

1) follow the relevant instructions from the Arch
guide (reproduced here for convenience):

As the "main-user" copy /etc/pulse/default.pa to ~/.pulse/default.pa and add:

load-module module-native-protocol-tcp auth-ip-acl=127.0.0.1

As the skype user, create ~/.pulse/client.conf and add:

default-server = 127.0.0.1

2) add the following to ~/.pulse/default.pa:

load-module module-jack-sink
load-module module-jack-source
set-default-sink jack_out
set-default-source jack_in

3) use a script such as the following to set up and then
when you are done, clean up the whole PA mess.

$ cat ~/bin/skype_pa
#!/bin/bash
pulseaudio --start
xhost +local: && su skype -c skype
pulseaudio --kill
xhost -

Of, course, skype_pa should be u+x, and ~/bin should
be in your $PATH.

Also, make sure that nothing is muted and mixer levels
are proper, this can be done through alsamixer.

That's it.  Now I am a fairly happy camper.  I'd be a lot
happier if skype audio was integrated better with a minimalist
system, but oh well.

One more thing, is you are concerned about typing skype
by accident, and this not running your script, either change
the script name or, like I did, alias `skype' to something like:

alias skype='echo Run skype_pa instead'

Enjoy.

emeres

Member

Registered: 2013-10-08

Posts: 1,570

Re: Skype audio in minimal environment and jackdmp

A very nice post. Should other users report this useful and correct, I would suggest you create a new page on the wiki with these instructions and link it on the PA and Skype pages or put this on one of them. It would just need to be rewritten a little bit, so that especially the background information is easily understandable to everybody.

Now I am a fairly happy camper.  I'd be a lot
happier if skype audio was integrated better with a minimalist
system, but oh well.

Maybe this is a good thing though that there is this obstacle. It filters out some potential [spy] victims of skype/microsoft/spy-agencies/other. Sadly there seems to be little interest in tox as an alternative to skype, that apparently went into alpha stage recently.