Using Pulse Audio–question

Home » CentOS » Using Pulse Audio–question
CentOS 6 Comments

Hi all!

This seems to me as if it should be a trivial thing to do, but so far I’ve wasted a lot of time on it and gotten nowhere:

I want to feed audio from a source (ipod, other player) into the audio input on my C7 box via either the phone jack or an external USB sound
“card” I have, then I want to play it via the speakers connected to the system.

I can find no way to do it with pavucontrol, nor the default mate sound tool.

Using pavucontrol and the external USB sound “card” (quote marks because it obviously isn’t a “card”) I can see the input coming in, but I can’t figure any way to send it back out to any output device.

I’m not wedded to using pulse for this, I’ll use alsa or whatever else can be beaten into submission, I just can’t understand why this isn’t a normal usage, and why it wouldn’t be easy to do.

All (on topic) advice gladly received.

Thanks in advance!

Fred

6 thoughts on - Using Pulse Audio–question

  • In my SL7 Mate system I use the Hardware and Output tabs in System->Preferences->Hardware->Sound

    Cheers Bill

  • Thanks bill.

    But nothing I do there causes output.

    As far as I can tell, the hardware tab just shows you what HW it recognizes, you can’t actually make any settings there.

    In pavucontrol, I can see the from the audio activity bar that the audio is getting into it, in the input tab. in the recording tab I can see it too, but there’s nothing in the playback tab that makes it come out the speakers. :(

    Fred

  • I do something similar to what you’re trying to do when I digitize my vinyl LPs.  I take output from my amp/turntable into my sound card and use Audacity to digitize it and write an appropriate sound file.  I also monitor the sound using Audacity by telling it to also route the sound to my speakers.  The point of all of this is that I think you need a piece of software (Audacity is probably overkill) to receive the input and play it back via the output.  You don’t mention any “playback” software.

    Cheers, Dave

    —
    “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.”

    — Benjamin Franklin

  • on many analog sound cards, the output mixer has a ‘monitor’ channel for the input mixer, so if you crank up the Line IN on the input mixer, then turn up the ‘monitor’ output on the output mixer, you should get passthrough audio without any software getting involved in moving the sound in realtime.

    this is much less likely to work with a seperate USB audio source, as thats not directly connected to your output. ditto it won’t work with USB
    speakers or headphones, as they are not directly connected to the source.

  • Yeah, I’ve done that with Audacity, when recording I can use its monitor function to feed audio to the computer’s audio out. And I’ll be doing that again in the not-far-distant future, as I have hundreds of LPs around here, at least some of which I’ll want to digitize.

    I have one other suggestion from another responder to check out before I fall back to doing this.

    thanks for the idea, though!

    Fred

  • John, thanks for the hint. I’ll certainly be giving that a try in the near future (possibly today).

    Took a brief look last night, using the USB input and only the input tab shows “monitor” items, but not the output tab. And I’m not sure that my analog input jacks on the computer are working, or at least I’ve never been able to get them to work (hence the USB audio thingie), though I’ll take another whack at it and see if I can see what you describe.

    Thanks forthe idea!

    Fred