 Audio can be very difficult to manage on Linux and that becomes even more true when you start introducing more hardware to your setups. So, if all you have is a set of speakers on your system and that's all you ever use, your audio setup is very easy. You never have to deal with anything other than changing the volume. You know, if that's you, that's really all you end up needing to do. But once you've introduced something else to your system, so for example, a webcam or a microphone or an audio interface, whatever it happens to be, or all three of those things or even more like if you've added a mixer or whatever, once you've added all that hardware to your setup, managing audio can be kind of a pain in the rear end. Now, there are a ton of different applications that are aiming to solve this problem. One of the most popular software solutions for managing that type of situation is called Jack. And if you've ever used Jack before, you'll know that it is not what you would call new user-friendly. It's really not. And while there is a lot of documentation out there for Jack, it still can be very overwhelming for the new user. So, when Uncle Bonehead, one of my patrons, pointed me towards an application called Pulse Meter, I was really interested because this looks like a simplistic alternative to Jack. Now, I don't think that that's actually what this is. And I'm sure that if someone who is more experienced with actually using Jack wanted to use Pulse Meter, they would probably find that it's fairly limiting. But for new users who are trying to manage their audio, Pulse Meter is actually a really interesting choice. I was going to say good choice, but I'm not so sure that it is. And it's not necessarily saying that there's anything wrong with Pulse Meter, but there is something wrong with Pulse Meter. And let's just get that part out of the way. Before we even jump into the application whatsoever, I just want to talk about the biggest negative that Pulse Meter has, especially when compared to other options for managing your audio setup. Pulse Meter has no documentation to speak of. Well, that's not actually true. It has a little bit, maybe 10 paragraphs worth of documentation. And to call those things paragraphs is being very generous. There may be a couple sentences each. So it doesn't have a lot of documentation. And that's kind of disappointing because this application, which I'm going to show you right now, is something that desperately needs some documentation. This is definitely, I think, simpler than something like Jack, I think. But it's not intuitive out of the box. So everything that I'm about to explain to you about Pulse Meter has been figured out through trial and error on my part. So there is a good chance that what I'm about to explain to you is completely wrong. I'm just going to put it up there right now. I want to be honest about this, that I'm not an expert in this application, but I'm going to try to explain this to you in as simple a way as possible. I'm going to actually turn my camera off so that you can see everything. And you'll see as we go through why it would be good to have better documentation than what it does. Actually, let me first show you with the documentation so that you don't think I'm just speaking out my ass. This right here is the Wiki for Pulse Meter. Now, there is some other documentation for installing Pulse Meter, but this is the how to use section. And as you can see, there is this section here and then a whole bunch of empty sections and then this section here. That's literally it. So I'm going to try to explain what Pulse Meter is and how to use it, but kind of keep the lack of documentation in mind and hopefully they'll forgive any mistakes I'm about to make. So let's go back to this thing. So what does this thing actually do and what is it good for? Now that I'm, you know, eight minutes into the video, you're probably wondering, you know, come on, Matt, get to the point of the video. Pulse Meter is a good way of routing audio from one place to another. That's as simple as it possibly can get. So you would take your actual hardware inputs and outputs and then you can assign them to these placeholders. So A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3, and then also virtual input 1, 2, and 3. Those nine placeholders allow you to route your inputs and outputs to applications on a case by case basis. So for example, up here along the top, you can choose your outputs. These are your actual hardware audio outputs. So for example, this right here is the DAC that I have sitting on my desk. It is hooked to my headphones, which is where I always have all my audio outputted to. Okay, I also have that set as A2 for whatever reason. I don't actually know why I thought I had that set to something different, but it doesn't matter. The point is, is that these are your actual audio outputs, which you can then do. So as an example of how you would use this here in the hardware input section, you would select an input. So for example, the Scarlett Solo is my audio interface. I selected that here. If you wanted to, you could press A1 here, which is assigned to my DAC, which would again is hooked to my headphones. If I selected A1, which I'm not going to do right now because I don't want to mess anything up, that would allow my microphone to input the audio directly through to my headphones. So this should be good for wanting to monitor your voice. Say you were singing or whatever. You don't want to hear me sing. It's not good at all. But let's just say you were in that situation and you wanted to monitor your voice. This would be a good way to do it. Now, one of the cool things is if you right-click on any of these things, you can control the latency between the input and the output. So if you want to hear your voice much quicker to your output, you could do that. Or if you wanted to have a more of a delay, whatever you wanted to have, you could monitor. This goes between like 1 and like 0 and 400 or something like that. And then you had to apply and it would allow you to select that latency. That's pretty cool. Another thing that it does is it allows you to mute that particular input so that you can maintain your setup here without having to turn it off. But you don't have to have the actual audio going from one place to another. The last thing that it does is it allows you to have noise reduction. Now, I have an air conditioner going on in the background and you can use this noise reduction to filter out that type of noise. To whatever output you've selected. So the one thing that I've noticed is that if you're using the routing here to go to a certain application. So for example, I have this input assigned to B1. Now, virtual output B1 is going to both OBS and also which is being used by Audacity. The one thing that I've noticed is that noise reduction doesn't always seem to work in certain applications. So for example, from what I can tell Audacity is not actually using this at all. It's just using my default set output. It's not using these at all. But if you go into the audio mixer of OBS and I selected the properties or whatever. I was able to choose audio output B1 as the source and that allowed me to have some of that noise reduction come through. Now you won't actually hear me that because I'm recording in Audacity and I'll do all my editing there. But I could see how this would be very useful for a stream because the noise reduction was actually pretty good. It didn't have that weird effect where you can get noise reduction in OBS. But if you turn that on, it only works when you're talking or maybe it only works when you're not talking. It's one of the other and it has this weird like fade in fade out effect and it's really annoying. That's one of the reasons why my streams don't always sound all that great. I'm sure there's a solution for that. Other people have I'm sure figured that out. I'm not much of a streamer. So again lack of experience at my part is more likely to blame than the software. So this also works for outputs from your computer in addition to inputs. So for example, I have the music player demon here that has allowed me to assign that output to virtual input three. I have that assigned to my desktop audio source in OBS, which is virtual input three. Over here, this here allows you to monitor and adjust those outputs. So for example, if I had the song playing, which I was playing before, I could do things like add EQ. I could add, I can mute them and change the volume over here as well. Now, outside of that, there's not much more to this application. That's why I was saying that it's very simple. Even though it was not an easy thing to explain. And I'm still not sure that I explained it all that well. We're going to remember what this is for is routing your inputs and outputs to different places. So so all of these inputs are always going to be available to whatever outputs that you have assigned up here. So this input can go to any of these outputs. So if I wanted them to go to a one, which is both of these right now are set to my deck. But if I change this one here to the speakers that I have hooked up and then I selected a two, I would be able to hear my voice coming outside through my speakers. I'm not going to turn that on because that would double things up. But the point is that you could then have your voice come through both of those things or whatever inputs you're wanting to do. You can have your input go through both of those things if that's what you want to do. Or let's just say you had two different things. So I have two microphones attached to my computer. I have the Halper 40, which I'm talking through right now. And I have the Brio webcam that has a microphone on it. Nobody wants to hear that type of audio. But let's just say that you wanted to collect both of those sources. You could do that and you could then route those that input to multiple different places. So I have the A2 set to my speakers. If I selected A2, you would be able to hear the audio coming through or being picked up by my webcam through my speakers. And I could change that to a different output or whatever. Then I could use those actual inputs and outputs to then assign those things to different applications. So whatever application happens to be here in the inputs and outputs section, I could assign those things that I've set up here to the applications down here and then route them wherever I need them to go. I hope I did an okay job explaining that. I'm assuming that at least half of you are still confused. And that's okay because I'm still confused too. And like I said, the biggest downside of this is the lack of documentation. As you can see, the lack of documentation really does frustrate me quite a bit because this is a very powerful piece of software. I think that this has the potential to be kind of groundbreaking for me in terms of being able to control my audio. Because like I said, I've had problems with audio before. One of the problems that I have quite often is that for whatever reason, sometimes my input here gets assigned as an output. So I will see in OBS instead of having just one input and output, I have both of them, you know, the levels going up and down at the same time. I think that I could use pulse meter to assign my microphone to where it needs to go. So I only had that one source as it's supposed to be. But the lack of documentation frustrates me because I want to know more about how I'm actually supposed to use this instead of just the guessing game that I've had to go through over the last few hours. And the thing about audio is once you mess it up, like once you've messed up your routing and stuff like that, I'm not sure if there's a good way to get it back to where it's supposed to be. The thing that really bothers me about this pulse meter thing outside of the lack of documentation is a lack of a reset button. I would adore a situation where it just has reset to defaults. I would love that, but there doesn't appear to be a way to do that. And that when I first looked into this really kind of scared me a little bit because if you mess something up, if you point your input to someplace where it's not supposed to go, like into DevNol or something, I don't know, you would have a situation where your microphone was technically working, but it was pointed to a place where you could never get to it. And that would really worry me. I don't think DevNol actually exists inside the application, but you kind of get the point where I feel like I have the chance to really mess something up because I have no guidance over how this is actually supposed to work. So I have a feeling, like I said, that a good portion of you are still quite confused over what this actually is. And I apologize for not doing a good job at actually explaining it. I hope that I've done a mediocre job at best, but I have a feeling that's much worse than that. But if you have questions, leave those in the comments section below. I will try to answer them or point you to a place where it could get answered. And one thing that you should know is that this works with Pulse Audio right now. Supposedly, there is an update coming in the next week or two weeks or something like that that's going to allow this to work with Pipeware as well. So if that's something that interests you, definitely give this a download and give it a try. You can also follow me on Twitter at The Linux Cast. You can follow me on Massedon or any of my other social media networks. You can find those links in the video description. You can support me on Patreon, like Uncle Bonehead does, by supporting me at patreon.com slash The Linux Cast. If you want to suggest a video, there are tiers that are available for you to suggest videos if you have ideas for those. So just pay attention to what the tiers offer. Thanks to all of these fantastic people who support me on Patreon and YouTube. I really truly do appreciate it. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.