Use of pulse virtual "monitoring" interfaces might be useful for muxing
audio, and can be done in the pavucontrol ui.
I used to have these crap foscam ip cameras that only worked via IE/DirectX
drivel, and occasionally would entertain/torment my birds in another room
with this where I had a camera monitoring them. I'd start the mic in IE on
my windoze vm, take the mic input from the vm and redirect to an audio
monitor output stream of mp3's playing on my main desktop, and worked
pretty well to mux between my parent desktop and even my windoze vm. The
monitor i/o's are powerful like this and useful, might be easier than
you're doing to link one input to another output.
Install pavucontrol, the original volume app for pulse, it gives you the
most options for control outside the os bastard versions they build for
"simple"(ton) audio control. I know at least the audio control in kde is
crap compared.
-mb
On Fri, Nov 20, 2020 at 7:50 AM Matt Graham via PLUG-discuss <
plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
> The firefox developers have basically said, "The microphone on your
> computer won't work at all unless you use pulseaudio."[0] I've been
> trying to avoid pulseaudio for various reasons.[1] But since
> Thanksgiving is canceled this year, I'll have to see the family
> virtually, and why not do that with bigbluebutton.org ? This led me to
> a twisty maze of unwarranted assumptions and outright stupidity, which I
> will try to summarize below. TL;DR: pulseaudio hates analog audio and
> making analog audio work properly requires editing config files by hand.
>
> I first tried building pulseaudio and firefox with the pulseaudio USE
> flag on my laptop. This worked almost perfectly. I expected this to
> work basically identically on my desktop, because both machines use
> sound cards that are driven by the snd_hda_intel module. Nope!
>
> pulseaudio has a strong preference for digital audio. Its
> autodetection will select the first digital device it finds as the
> default audio output. For me, this was the HDMI output... which is
> hooked up to the TV, which is almost never on. My actual sound card was
> also found, but it wasn't the default output, and it was set to output
> sound to the iec-958-stereo-output (S/PDIF jack). I do not have
> anything plugged in to that. Setting the default output to the analog
> sound card didn't work; pulseaudio refused to write any data to the
> analog card.
>
> I found a solution at
> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio/Examples , link
> "Simultaneous HDMI and analog output". If a digital device exists,
> pulseaudio refuses to send data to analog devices unless it can *also*
> send data to a digital device. This makes no sense. I have no idea how
> ordinary users would deal with this problem. The solution was to put
> the lines:
>
> # make pulseaudio work with analog and digital things at
> # the same time. Load analog device (NOTE: use aplay -l
> # to find the hw: numbers for the device you need, they
> # will be displayed as "card X: (name) device Y: and you
> # need to put those numbers in there. X and Y for me
> # were both 0 because my analog card's first on the
> # PCI bus. YMMV.)
> load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:X,Y
> load-module module-combine-sink sink_name=combined
> set-default-sink combined
>
> ...up at the top of the /etc/pulse/default.pa file. I have no idea how
> Mint/Ubuntu et al would handle this for ordinary users. There is no way
> to do any of this with the slightly more user-friendly pavucontrol[2].
> I've had these speakers for 21 years, which may be a bit unusual, but
> are people really abandoning analog sound? Regardless, I'm leaving this
> here in the hopes that some crawler will find it and some search engine
> will lead someone to a quicker fix than the multiple-hour @#%^ing around
> I had to do.
>
> [0] "Select the audio input and output devices that exist and put them
> into 2 lists, have user choose speaker/mike from those 2 lists" is
> apparently much more difficult with ALSA than with pulseaudio or
> whatever OS X/Doze provides. Or the firefox developers are lazy and
> clueless.
>
> [1] Poettering, nuff said.
>
> [2] Our UX experts have determined that the best way to deal is to
> pretend we're a phone! So the menubar doesn't act like a menubar acts
> in real applications! Isn't that edgy and disruptive?
>
> --
> Crow202 Blog: http://crow202.org/wordpress
> There is no Darkness in Eternity
> But only Light too dim for us to see.
> ---------------------------------------------------
> PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org
> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings:
> https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
---------------------------------------------------
PLUG-discuss mailing list -
PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings:
https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
(text/plain)