LinuxMusicians

First, this isn't quite music related, so I'm not asking anything about recording, etc. I think this is more of a driver or compatability issue.

So my setup is the aforementioned Scarlett interface, and it runs through some JBL studio monitors. When i installed Kubuntu months ago, it pretty much worked out the box, I can play music and hear online videos etc. Haven't got into recording on linux yet.

But my problem is gaming. On Steam proton, so many games I want to play work fine, but most of them have no audio. I'm wondering if there's some kind of conflict trying to find Scarlett? In Pulse, none of the games show up in the monitoring. I've tried so many solutions I've seen on google (not scarlett related wise, there is nothing there). Not trying to ask all for some gaming tech support here, but I've asked around many other places and there doesn't seem to be anyone that can figure this out, so I figured I'd ask people who use this type of gear.

So now I think I in fact found a compatibility issue, but no solution. I found that when I disable the scarlet 18i20 in Pulse, and it's now using another device, the games now show up in the playback tab and show audio playing. But I can't hear anything since it's not going into my JBL studio monitors. How do I work around this?

Pulseaudio does all kinds of weird things when it detects more than 2 outputs.

You can use pavumeter while you play a steam game. Then you see how many outputs it uses and which.

I guess you could solve all kinds of problems by making jack your main audio system and let pulseaudio output to jack via module-jack-sink. This module understands channels=2 so you can enforce use of the first 2 outputs of your audio interface.

See http://marzen.de/Holger/pulseaudio_and_jack/

There are a zillion other ways to output all kinds of clients (ALSA, pulseaudio, jack) to one audio interface.
And probably there are other ways to tell pulseaudio how many output channels it should use.

bluebell wrote:Pulseaudio does all kinds of weird things when it detects more than 2 outputs.

You can use pavumeter while you play a steam game. Then you see how many outputs it uses and which.

I guess you could solve all kinds of problems by making jack your main audio system and let pulseaudio output to jack via module-jack-sink. This module understands channels=2 so you can enforce use of the first 2 outputs of your audio interface.

See http://marzen.de/Holger/pulseaudio_and_jack/

There are a zillion other ways to output all kinds of clients (ALSA, pulseaudio, jack) to one audio interface.
And probably there are other ways to tell pulseaudio how many output channels it should use.

Thanks for this, I followed that link and have jack running. Looking in pulse, everything appears to be in working order but I don't hear any audio still. What could I be missing? I feel like I'm getting warmer to the solution.

edit: solved it. I had to go back into PulseAudio and it now lets me change the programs from Jack Sink back to Scarlett 18i20, everything works now. Thanks!

Huh? If pulseaudio uses the Scarlett directly then there is no difference compared to your first try.