Audio driver for plugins only taking input from MIC

[jimruxton]

Currently the audio driving the plugins seems to only be triggered by my mic on my laptop. Is there a way to capture pcm signal directly from ALSA in IQSynth? If I play a sound file on my laptop the plugin parameters I select are being driven via the sound my mic picks up. This is fine in most cases however if I want to just use headphones IQSynth no longer picks up the sounds. This may be more an ALSA or pulseaudio issue but wondering if this has been encountered before and what the solution is to get IQSynth to take in the raw pcm signal and not the signal from my mic.

[ghost]

Hi @jimruxton , what I've done in the past is use the alsamixer loopback option, but it was fiddly to set up. Eavesdropping on the audio signal can be done as well, but again its a fiddly setup, and the dummy loopback option seemed a bit easier at the time.

At the moment I loop the audio out, (via a mini mixer so I can still hear the output), to the in and make sure I don't use anything to 'play' the incoming so I don't get feedback, and as IQSynth doesn't 'play' out what its capturing this works for me.

[jimruxton]

Thanks @johnday-github . I'll look into using loopback. Curious if you have investigated using the pcm output as well as capture as the sound input to IQSynth. It would be nice if this was selectable. I say this having no idea how difficult that is in terms of programming however.

[ghost]

Hi @jimruxton, not quite sure how I'd be able to do it, if I wanted to. For instance, can you do this in another application, say Audacity, i.e. record the sounds, not from an input (mic/line), but just whatever is running on the desktop.

[jimruxton]

Hi @johnday-github . If I am recording in audacity I can start up the control panel for pulseaudio ( pavucontrol ) and under recording tab select the Recording tab and select "monitor of built in audio ..." for audacity and it records whatever is on my soundcard with the mic volume at 0. I can also record directly off the sound card with OBS so I guess it's possible. One quirk I noticed is that I open the sound settings panel in Ubuntu or pavucontrol, while either of those are open I can't select the audio input under the external tab in IQSynth. Not sure why that is. I can only select if these settings panels are closed.

[ghost]

Hi @jimruxton , damn thought this should be possible but couldn't work it out before. Thank you for the pointers. Yep, IQSynth will only list audio devices that report that they are 'free / available' in ALSA. I'll probably need to revisit this at some point and look into using a pulseaudio library but not yet.

[jimruxton]

@johnday-github I have always found Linux audio a bit mysterious and though powerful requiring some wizardry to truly understand and get to work as one would like. I'm not there yet :) .