Audio stream mangement in Linux

Question

I have a very complicated audio setup for a project. Here's what we have:

• 3 applications playing sound
• 2 applications recording sound
• 2 sound cards

I really don't really have the code to any of these applications. All I want to do is monitor and control the audio streams. Here are a few examples of operations I'd like to do while the applications are running:

• Mute one of the incoming audio streams.
• Have one of the incoming audio streams do a "solo" (be the only stream that can "talk").
• Get a graph (about 30 seconds worth) of the audio that each stream produced.
• Send one of the audio streams to soundcard #1, but all three audio streams to soundcard #2.

I would likely switch audio streams every 2 minutes or so with one of the operations listed above. A GUI would be preferred. I started looking at the sound systems in Linux and it gets extremely complex and I feel like there have been many new advances in the past few years. I see jack, pulseaudio, artsd, and several other packages. They all have some promise but where should I start? Is there something someone already built that can help?

Answer 1

PulseAudio should be able to let you do all that. You'll need to configure a custom pipeline for splitting the app's audio for task 4, and I'm not exactly certain how you'd accomplish task 3, but I do know that it's capable of all sorts of audio stream handling via its volume control (pavucontrol).

Answer 2

I use Jack, which is quite simple to install and use, even if it requires more efforts to configure with Flash and Firefox ... You can try the latest Ubuntu Studio distribution and see if it solves your problem (for the GUI, look at "patchage").