On Sun, Apr 26, 2020 at 1:06 PM Jorge Almeida <jjalmeida@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Apr 26, 2020 at 8:34 PM Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
<SNIP>
> > I'll investigate what I can do sending files by hand. However on the USB only machine all the internal sound card hardware is blacklisted so modules aren't loaded. I don't know that I want to upset the environment on that machine very much but a bit more about this at the bottom of this post.
> >
> No, please don't bother. I only mentioned because I thought you might
> know it out of hand. I'll search documentation about pulseaudio, if I
> can find it. It occurred to me that it would be an acceptable setup if
> pulseaudio could be coaxed into managing just the USB card (as hw
> card, not as virtual card) and leave the HD audio alone. I would use
> the USB to voice chat and the MB card to everything else. (I would
> have to buy another pair of headphones, but maybe headphones for
> speech-only would not add too much clutter to the desk...)
>
Some reading I did about people having problems similar to yours with discord and zoom suggested that some of these aps are compiled to __only__ support pulseaudio and then they supply it if it's not already on the system. Even though you don't build it using a specific portage entry in your world file doesn't mean it's not on your system if it was buried in the zoom/discord code.
1) Run 'pulseaudio' at the command line to check
2) If it's there run pavucontrol at the command line to get started configuring it. pulseaudio can, on paper anyway, mix multiple audio signals on the fly and can (I think) send the mixed audio to multiple sound cards.
Any 'real' pulseaudio build can be configured to not 'autospawn' via it's config files. That way people who don't want it, or think they don't, can have it on the system but run it only when they need it and shut it down when they don't. I did that for awhile. That sort of setup might be more acceptable for your needs and would allow you to build it and manage it yourself. I don't know. Something to consider. On Gentoo I wouldn't be fearful of building it and trying it out. Not sure what flags you'd want to enable or whether you'll end up in some sort of dependency hell as can happen with this sort of stuff on Gentoo.
Cheers,
Mark