Arch Linux

Franco_64

Member

From: Milano, Italy

Registered: 2021-11-20

Posts: 49

Universal patchbay or...?

Hi all,

I'm trying to get my audio system to work properly, ensuring interoperability between the various devices. Here is my setup:

- Internal sound card (Intel) of my HP Spectre laptop
- USB class compliant external sound card
- Usb microphone
- Bluetooth speakers
- Bluetooth headphones

I use Alsa, PulseAudio (to be able to listen/recording streams from apps like Spotify or Firefox) and Jack2

The requirements are here:

- to be able to record from my USB sound card and simultaneously listen and record an audio streamed by some software (Spotify, Firefox ...) via internal soundcard, USB soundcard or Bluetooth

- To be able to play the sound coming from my external sound card via Bluetooth

All my peripherals work correctly, but between Pavucontrol, Catia etc I get lost, and often I am unable to direct the signal correctly.

The ideal would be to have a universal patch bay that allows me to keep everything under control, but from what I understand it does not exist (Catia works only with Jack and not with my bluetooth devices, for example).

Advices?

Last edited by Franco_64 (2021-12-10 19:29:30)

progandy

Member

Registered: 2012-05-17

Posts: 5,279

Re: Universal patchbay or...?

The ideal would be to have a universal patch bay that allows me to keep everything under control, but from what I understand it does not exist (Catia works only with Jack and not with my bluetooth devices, for example).

You can try to replace pulseaudio and jack2 with pipewire, then you can use any jack patchbay or helvum. PipeWire aims to be the universal media framework for audio and video devices, but there may still be some issues with jack clients.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire

If you want to stay with jack2 combined with pulseaudio, you may want to look into creating custom jack devices in pulseaudio to have more ports available to transfer audio between the two audio servers. (I have never used such a setup, though)
https://askubuntu.com/questions/680817/ … iple-sinks

For pulseaudio there is a graph interface as well called pagraphcontrol. (using electron, if you care about that)

Last edited by progandy (2021-12-10 19:46:37)

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Maniaxx

Member

Registered: 2014-05-14

Posts: 757

Re: Universal patchbay or...?

Pipewire (compared to Jack2) also shows ALSA loopback nodes (snd_aloop). This way you can create several "virtual soundcards" to connect to custom audio graphs.
The loopback devices are much more compatible than any ALSA logical devices that are not shown/detected by every app (like Wine).

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sys2064