 hey everybody welcome back to the channel today we're going to be talking a little bit about audio on linux now i've done a video on this before i'm pretty sure i've done martin and i did a podcast on this before uh but i've been thinking about it a lot more lately in the you know if you've listened to the podcast you'll know that i got a new microphone set up i got this microphone here which i'm banging around sorry about that uh and um i've had the microphone itself for a while but i didn't have a you know a way for it to be hooked up and i'm still you know touching it so i need to stop doing that um so i got an audio interface it's a it's a solo uh scarlet solo i'm not exactly sure who makes it it starts with an f it doesn't matter the point is that i have this audio usb audio interface and uh you know it's very i guess complicated in the terms of i mean when i first started doing podcasting i had no idea what i would need one of those one day uh and it works fine if you're on windows or mac os i mean it's just plug and play has its own software and all this stuff if you use linux it's not so easy to configure so there's no native linux support now this is uh uh this video is not to meant to be critic criticizing the scarlet solo uh once you got it up and running which i have you know it it's been perfectly fine i have no complaints about it i know there are other audio interfaces out there that work fine on linux as well but also have no official support this is just you know kind of the fact of you know life when you're living on linux sometimes the things that you buy in terms of hardware just aren't supported uh via official software the point of the video actually is to kind of uh talk a little bit about something that's called pavu control now almost every audio control interface on linux is based on pavu control the one in genome i believe is is based on pavu control the one in kde definitely is uh and obviously pavu control it's stuff now everyone's wondering what the hell pavu control is probably if you've never used a tally window manager you may never have used it because you chances are you're using your desktop environments built in audio you know settings panel uh even though those are probably based on pavu control so but if you use a tally window manager before you'll know what i'm talking about it looks like this this is pavu control and in its stock form it doesn't look you know horribly you know over complicated or something but it's not great and the reason why i'm doing this video is because i'm it's it's kind of reiterated the fact to me that audio on linux still isn't that great and i'm going to make this point probably over and over again i think that audio on linux should be more like audio on phones uh when you plug something into a phone usually your bluetooth or your headphones they just work this if you're on an iphone you plug in a usb microphone which you can do with a dongle obviously uh it works same thing with it with android for the most part um and it has audio settings but it's very simple audio settings they're not complicated now granted you'll want to be able to do more things with a desktop audio setup so it's understandable that the the setting the process of setting those things up is more complicated but there's a point where it gets too complicated so let's just we're going to use my uh experience trying to get the scarlet solo to work uh as an example uh so my biggest problem when i first plugged in this scarlet solo is that it would it's it worked as both an input and an output and and some programs that was perfectly fine uh some programs it really messed things up so like firefox really is only ever looking for an output for sound uh and most of the time when i listen to something through firefox usually a youtube video or whatever uh i would want those to come through my bluetooth headphones not through the starlet solo so even now you know ages after i've finally figured all this out sometimes i'll have to open up pavu control and select specifically my headphones uh when firefox is playing something because sometimes it tries to default to the scarlet solo even though i have my these cohen uh e7s uh you know set as default no matter when when they you know hook up to the computer and that doesn't happen all the time it's very very inconsistent uh another one my biggest problem was skype now i i just did a video that was probably posted yesterday at this point on alternatives to skype and the reason why i got on on that journey of trying to find something alternative to skype was because i could not get the scarlet solo to work in skype at all it would recognize it as an input device or excuse me would recognize it as an output device so make for headphones but it would not recognize the microphone itself and eventually i got i did get it to work and the way i got to work was going into advanced configuration files here at the end and changing this weird uh like this one up here i changed it to digital stereo input and it it defaults to analog stereo output and i had to go through each one of these settings i mean there's a whole bunch of them i'm not going to change it because i really don't want to risk it not working again uh excuse me and that is what eventually got it so that it would work most of the time with skype and other things while simultaneously also working with something like audacity because with audacity once wanted it to be analog because it only records in mono so it was very very complicated and it made me realize that pav u control itself is kind of flawed because when you don't have a when something's not let's say you have your headphones plugged in to your computer but you're not using them uh sometimes they won't even show up in pav u control same thing with the microphone or the scarlet solo like for example if i go over here to playback the scarlet solo doesn't actually show up here at all even though it is connected right now but because nothing is using it no applications using it which is untrue because it the obs is actually using it right now which is enough i mean why isn't it showing up in playback because technically it's still on i could be using it for uh output because it hasn't it hasn't output jack on it but it's not here listed at all and you can't control it at all unless it's there it so right i would have to have some kind of application that was explicitly explicitly using it for playback in order for it to even show up on here even though it's connected to the computer uh like i said this is very complicated uh and it's too complicated when something's hooked up to the computer everything that is capable of doing should have you know the ability to be toggled or whatever messed around with uh now i understand that would probably make anything it's more complicated but the biggest problem i have with pav u control is that things disappear so like right now the scarlet solo is not on the playback uh it is on the um recording so you can see the scarlet solo third gen is listed here but look at this it's listed three times it's like it's listed three times like why is it listed three times it doesn't make any sense it doesn't need to be listed three times when you plug in your microphones your your microphones your headphones your phone it doesn't list your your headphones three times because it happens to have a microphone in it no it just listens listens say hey you've you've connected a headset and you know and that gives you some maybe a few settings or whatever but no on linux we have to over complicate things and have these things because not only is this using pulse audio it's also using also because pulse audio doesn't actually do anything on its own it has to have also uh you know you know it's i i think the the the point of everything is that audio on linux is just entirely too complicated way too complicated and it's not it's i think it stems from years and years of them trying to get audio to work at all on linux because for years and years the reason why you know linux kind of was terrible was because every time you wanted to do something especially if it involved sound or video you know it just did not work because linux does not have the drivers that windows has access to it just they for the most part that's just the way it is everything that the linux community has been able to kind of cobble together you know uh to get sound and video to work is exactly that it's cobbled together on top of these technologies that we really didn't have access to and that's kind of led led to this hodgepodge of shit you know you from 20 years worth of work that has never been kind of uh you know codified into a singular way of doing things and it's the reason why you need also and pulse audio it's the reason why pavu control lists three of these things and sometimes when something's not there at all you know it disappears even though it's still connected to your computer and able to be used it just isn't being you know used technically by you know any application so there's a be all end all of it is just that audio on linux needs a refresh it needs any we need to take everything on linux that we've learned over the last 20 years 20 30 years of trying to get linux of trying to get audio to work into something that's more modern something that's you know more uh adept at handling more modern devices like the scarlet solo ones that are more more some kind of software that's more adept at handling modern workflows that is you know for streaming and uh input devices multiple input devices which is not very well managed when you're talking about pulse or pavu control and pulse audio and things like that so that is basically just the end of my rant uh it was a rant in the end i should just be grateful that audio on linux works and i was able to you know figure out how to get my scarlet solo to work at all i am grateful for that i really am and i salute all the people you know who have tirelessly worked trying to get audio to work on linux for the last 30 years i really do it was like a gargantuan task and those people are saints you know it's fantastic because right now if you want to use something on linux in its bay in its basic like headphones or you know monitors or speakers or whatever chances are you just plug those in they're gonna work now it's when you go that extra you know you know step and want to use something that's unusual like a audio interface where you start to have some kind of problems because it's the system that we have now is not was never really built for those extra complexities that we're trying to add on top of it so that is it for this time if you really enjoyed this rant give me a thumbs up if not thumbs down if you are interested in seeing more fos and linux related content make sure you subscribe and hit the notification icon bell think i'm a jigger 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