Re:Tyranny of the Marginal User: why software gets worse, no...
by nyanpasu64 on Friday September 15, 2023 @02:56AM
(#37519448)
From what I hear, PulseAudio inherently lacks the architecture to create arbitrary audio routing graphs. PipeWire can do it for audio with apps like Helvum and QPWGraph, but not for all windows (only webcams and perhaps screen sharing). The view does get confusing as the number of apps/nodes increases though. One point of confusion is that in Helvum, Pulse apps have a playback and monitor node (and the monitor is a copy of the input), but JACK apps have an input and output (where the output is the result of the app applying effects to the input, or an unrelated audio stream altogether). I'm not sure where native PipeWire apps lie.
IMO there's no reason you can't. Just yesterday I was playing with pavucontrol and thought "There needs to be a GNU Radio like view, where I can drop boxes which represent sound generating/taking programs/devices and draw connecting lines arbitrarily," then I thought why not the same thing for video treating even the contents of windows themselves as video sources too!
Table formats are easier to implement I guess...