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loteran

Member

Registered: 2026-08-23

Posts: 3

Arctis Sound Manager - SteelSeries Arctis headset control and PipeWire

Arctis Sound Manager is a daemon and Qt interface for SteelSeries Arctis
headsets: it drives the vendor HID interface no in-tree driver claims, and adds
the PipeWire side that the vendor software provides on other platforms.

What it does

• Battery level, sidetone, ANC, ChatMix, inactivity timeout and the on-device
      equaliser, read and written over the vendor HID interface

• Separate Game, Chat and Media sinks as ordinary PipeWire nodes, so
      per-application balance can be set with any volume control

• A parametric equaliser per channel, implemented as a PipeWire filter chain

• HeSuVi-based virtual surround

• The OLED screen on GameDAC models

Twenty headset families are described by declarative YAML profiles rather than
by code, so adding a revision is a profile, not a patch.

Install

$ paru -S arctis-sound-manager

It needs pipewire, pipewire-pulse and wireplumber. The equaliser presets load
LADSPA plugins from swh-plugins; without them the filter chain comes up without
its filters, which is audible as an equaliser that does nothing.

The daemon runs as a user service:

$ systemctl --user enable --now arctis-manager.service

Access to the vendor HID interface needs udev rules; the package installs them.
A dongle that was already connected when the package was installed keeps its old
permissions until it is reconnected.

Relation to headsetcontrol

headsetcontrol
covers battery and sidetone across many vendors and is in [extra]; if that is
all that is needed, it is the smaller tool and the better fit. Arctis Sound
Manager is Arctis-only and exists for the audio-routing half - the virtual
channels, the equaliser and the surround stage.

Status and reporting

Source and issue tracker:
https://github.com/loteran/Arctis-Sound-Manager

Bug reports are most useful with the output of the built-in report:

$ asm-cli diagnose

It collects the USB tree, the udev rules in force, the PipeWire and WirePlumber
state and the recent journal, with settings redacted.

I am the author. Reports of hardware I do not own are what most of the device
support has been built from, so a revision that is detected but whose controls
do nothing is worth an issue rather than a workaround.

Made with AI.