[pulseaudio-discuss] Streaming audio from a game to voice chat, mixed with audio from microphone

[Sean Greenslade]

On Tue, Sep 28, 2021 at 03:38:59PM +0100, Patrick May wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I want to stream audio from a game to discord, while also sharing my mic at
> the same time.
> 
> This is a very common thing that people do all the time on other operating
> systems. For some reason this seems to be almost impossible to do with
> Pulseaudio.
> 
> Why is it so difficult?

It's certainly not impossible, but it's more of an advanced feature so
not many of the user utilities expose an easy way of doing this. There
was actually a discussion about something pretty similar last year on
the mailing list. This message here:

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/pulseaudio-discuss/2020-May/031770.html

...was my response describing the setups for doing a simple "mic +
program audio" mix, as well as a more complicated "mic + program audio
with separate monitoring bus" mix. The audio routing gets a bit
complicated since you need to be careful not to create feedback loops.
Feel free to read through that whole message thread, there's a lot of
info in it.

To your other question about how to make loopbacks work, you need to
use the pulseaudio source or sink names. To find these, run one of the
following commands:

$ pactl list sinks
$ pactl list sources

...and look for the "Name:" line under each listed source / sink.

Feel free to ask if there's still anything that's unclear.

--Sean