Linux Audio Woes

Ahh, my old friend. Welcome back.

So before we blame linux, this is my fault. I created this problem for myself. This gemlog will be my documentation on how I actually went about resolving this!

The problem

My computer setup isn't exactly the "most optimal". Up until a week ago I my setup was:

A linux desktop PC

A USB hub with a Webcam, Audio interface, a DAC, a separate USB-C splitter with a Keyboard and Mouse

A headphone amp connected to the DAC

2 Studio Monitors (speakers) connected to the headphone amp

This meant I had two sound sources and 4 total USB peripherals. I still have some bonkers USB issues, and sometimes I lose a bit of connectivity on my keyboard and mouse. This USB hub was acting as a "dock" for my work laptop where I could just swap the PC USB-C plug and swap all the peripherals to my work laptop. Except the display which I used separate sources for each. And ethernet, which has their own cable from my network switch.

So yeah. A rats nest. The ACTUAL problem was buried in that list. My PC speakers were setup to my DAC. Which meant they weren't connected to my audio interface. So the speakers I bought specifically to help me mix my music became glorified PC speakers, total overkill. Now on serious mixing days I'd swap the cables out but I got lazy and stopped doing that, just mixing using my headphones. Enough was enough so I removed the redundant DAC from the setup, leaning on the audio interface to by my primary audio I/O device.

But Wine didn't like that.

Now, this isn't my first issue using my interface for things other than with my DAW. I wanted to use my actual XLR vocal microphone as my mic during meetings at work and this was not as smooth as I had hoped. I ended up having to remap the device leading to some just extra frustrations... I can post that setup later if people are interested. I'll probably do it for my own posterity since I've forgotten exactly what I've done.

But yeah - games. So in the games pulseaudio was not meshing with this device over Wine. Wine saw the device and I could set it as the default but no sound would come out (I still don't exactly know why). So I had to swap the audio drive in Wine to alsa, and then setup the device and we're good :) - Now to see if I can default that for all proton prefixes...

The steps taken

Using protontricks (or winetricks pointed at the games Wineprefix in: "/path/to/SteamLibrary/steamapps/compdata/<game-id>/pfx") - run "Change settings"

Select sound=alsa

Run winecfg

Configure Audio to use the correct audio device (and for me switch from 5.1 to stereo just in case)

Conclusion

So now everything works. I was actually pleasantly surprised after messing around in Focusrite Control to make sure all the I/Os were setup properly, I had full speaker, headphone and mic I/Os working without a hitch and it worked on my laptop and worked on my desktop PC for everything except Wine!

And had I went straight to the wine docs to look up audio configurations I'dve been able to try this straight away instead of websearching old forums for semi related issues wasting a bunch of time!

gemlog

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