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Is there a GUI tool that lets you really get at the guts of PulseAudio configuration? This has come up fairly recently for me as I was looking to get 7.1 surrou

Is there a GUI tool that lets you really get at the guts of PulseAudio configuration? This has come up fairly recently for me as I was looking to get 7.1 surround virtualization on headphones working on Ubuntu (I did succeed at this). The two tools I found - 'pavucontrol' seems like just a mixer, 'paprefs' doesn't show you anything about modules. I want something that shows me what PulseAudio modules are available to build a signal chain with, possibly also handling configuring LADSPA plugins in the chain. I was really surprised that there seemed to be no way to 'list all modules available for loading on the system' (there seems to be only 'list all modules already loaded' which means I needed to Google to find out what the possible modules are). Is there something like this already? If not, I would actually be tempted to build something like this myself - I need a good excuse to learn Qt :)

jancsika 7y ago
Not that I know of. But there is something like that for Jack: https://qjackctl.sourceforge.io/ https://qjackctl.sourceforge.io/
bscphil 7y ago
> 'pavucontrol' seems like just a mixer It's not a pro-level tool and probably doesn't have the flexibility you are looking for, but pavucontrol is much more than just a mixer. For example I can use it to control which input devices individual recording applications are reading from, and which output devices individual applications are playing to. You can also manage (but not create?) virtual devices that can be used as both inputs and outputs, and use a monitor of any output device as an input, etc etc. If you do build something that gives complete access to pulseaudio devices and their mappings, I'd love to see the results. I would definitely use such an application. > I was really surprised that there seemed to be no way to 'list all modules available for loading on the system' Does `pactl list` give you what you're looking for?
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- Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
  Not quite; 'pactl list modules' will give me a list of all currently loaded modules, but it doesn't tell you what modules are available on the system to be loaded. So you can't use it as a way to discover PulseAudio functionality. For example, in the 7.1 surround example I mentioned, you load the module 'module-virtual-surround-sink' (I followed this guide: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/2ot5ov/enable_system_wide_hrtf_with_pulseaudio/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/2ot5ov/enable...). I didn't know this functionality existed and none of the tools gave me a way to discover it. It was only through that linked guide and then later the 'PulseAudio Under the Hood' page discussed here that I found out about it. (as an aside - module-virtual-surround-sink is extremely cool; you can load your own custom spatialization HRIR into it)

jancsika 7y ago

Not that I know of. But there is something like that for Jack: https://qjackctl.sourceforge.io/ https://qjackctl.sourceforge.io/

bscphil 7y ago

> 'pavucontrol' seems like just a mixer It's not a pro-level tool and probably doesn't have the flexibility you are looking for, but pavucontrol is much more than just a mixer. For example I can use it to control which input devices individual recording applications are reading from, and which output devices individual applications are playing to. You can also manage (but not create?) virtual devices that can be used as both inputs and outputs, and use a monitor of any output device as an input, etc etc. If you do build something that gives complete access to pulseaudio devices and their mappings, I'd love to see the results. I would definitely use such an application. > I was really surprised that there seemed to be no way to 'list all modules available for loading on the system' Does `pactl list` give you what you're looking for?

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Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
Not quite; 'pactl list modules' will give me a list of all currently loaded modules, but it doesn't tell you what modules are available on the system to be loaded. So you can't use it as a way to discover PulseAudio functionality. For example, in the 7.1 surround example I mentioned, you load the module 'module-virtual-surround-sink' (I followed this guide: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/2ot5ov/enable_system_wide_hrtf_with_pulseaudio/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/2ot5ov/enable...). I didn't know this functionality existed and none of the tools gave me a way to discover it. It was only through that linked guide and then later the 'PulseAudio Under the Hood' page discussed here that I found out about it. (as an aside - module-virtual-surround-sink is extremely cool; you can load your own custom spatialization HRIR into it)