Any Way of Sending Arbitrary Audio Over Remote Play?

[ColPanic]

I had originally posted this in the general help forum, and was directed here.

I was wondering if Steam allows (even if it's a dirty hack) for the possibility of routing audio from arbitrary audio sources on the Remote Play host PC to the Remote Play client?
I've noticed when I have Remote Play running, Steam opens a new PulseAudio recording sink. I can direct an audio source to this sink, and *sometimes* hear the audio on the Remote Play client. This doesn't always work, so I'm assuming this isn't what that PulseAudio sink is meant for.

So how and where, then, does Steam listen for game audio to forward on to the Remote Play client? There must be a way of directing other audio streams to this interface.

I have a few different uses in mind for this, but mostly, I'm trying to get RockSmith with JACK and WineASIO to work on my Steam Link.

[Marlock]

the default behaviour here was transmitting the system's entire audio output, not just from the running game

[ColPanic]

Thanks Marlock, but that doesn't really make sense to me. This would seem to imply that as long as an audio stream is directed to a PulseAudio input sink, I should hear it through Remote Play. Except that not only is this not happening, but some other applications that use PulseAudio (ie. Firefox) aren't audible through Remote Play either.

[Marlock]

i used it a while ago, so maybe they changed the default...

in any case, regardless of a change in default from all system sounds to a specific sink, it seems like you have some inconsistent behaviour sending stuff to the sink and getting it to work

how are you trying to manage this? pavucontrol, terminal or something else? all via PulseAudio or mixing PulseAudio and JACK sorurces/targets?

which distro and version? (because eg: fedora 34 was the first to ship PipeWire as a drop-in replacement to the old pulseaudio and ALSA implementations)

are the sound frequencies matched or is there a chance this is running into a pesky 44.000Hz vs. 48.000Hz issue?

[ColPanic]

I'm running JACK and PulseAudio simultaneously, managing Pulse through pauvcontrol and pacmd; and JACK through Studio Controls and Carla. All my Pulse sinks are 44k, and my JACK devices are 48k. I'm not sure how the JACK to Pulse bridge handles this, do you think changing the default Pulse sample rate could help?

I haven't tried migrating to PipeWire yet. I've heard good things, so I'll have to try it out sometime soon. How does it compare to JACK for audio work, by the way?

[Marlock]

yes, mismatched frequencies may be interfering here, and setting up pulse-audio to jack bridges and vice-versa is finicky, make sure to use that in your further searches for a solutions

Pipewire makes it easier to make pulseaudio and jack stuff work together, but AFAIK quality *can* suffer a bit in a few cases (intrinsic differences in how JACK and Pipewire operate)

[ColPanic]

So I've just installed Pipewire, and I gotta say it's pretty great. WineASIO doesn't seem to work with Pipewire, so I'm running Rocksmith with a startup command to start a Jack server with Pipewire as the master device:

jackd -d alsa -d pipewire -p 64 -r 48000 -n 2 & %command%

Pipewire and Jack are working together flawlessly!
I'll post another update when I get around to trying this setup with the Steam Link.

[ColPanic]

It works! Remote play gives me a 'Steam' pipewire interface that directs everything to the Steam Link!
Unfortunately the audio latency over the Link makes Rocksmith just barely playable, but this opens up a ton of new doors!

Edit: Nope, spoke too soon. Just like my previous setup, this only works sometimes. Only now when it doesn't work, I get no audio over Remote Play at all, from any game.

[Marlock]

despite being about a linux smartphone, this just might be useful to you...
https://puri.sm/posts/speak-to-me/

[ColPanic]

I found the problem! I had a bad pipewire config and was running two pipewire sessions simultaneously. After resolving this, my pipewire 'Steam' interface is always sending its audio to the Steam Link!

[Marlock]

awesome!

glad it's all working now