mjhjmtu

I need to create two ALSA loopback interfaces to link two applications.

I have the following in /etc/modprobe.d/sound.conf -

alias snd-card-1 snd-aloop
options snd-aloop pcm_substreams=2,2 id=1,2 enable=1,1 index=10,11

This creates the loopbacks and it's working, but it also creates loads of surround sound interfaces that I do not require. Example below-

surround51:CARD=D2,DEV=0
 Loopback, Loopback PCM
 5.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Rear and Subwoofer speakers
surround71:CARD=D2,DEV=0
 Loopback, Loopback PCM
 7.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Side, Rear and Woofer speakers

Is there anyway I can create loopback devices for Stereo only?

Thanks

I discovered there were configuration files in:

/usr/share/alsa/pcm

That were creating the surround sound interfaces. I deleted the files, and the interfaces are no longer created.

Alternative with Pulseaudio:

To make one application under Pulseaudio record the output of another application is fairly easy:

Pulseaudio has the concept of sound sources and sound sinks. You can arbitrarily connect up application to those. Pulseaudio has modules to remember those connections, and will restore the connection sthe next time the application is restarted (if the connection is possible). Otherwise Pulseaudio will choose default connections for you.

You can inspect and change all this using the pavucontrol GUI, which also allows you to change volume controls both on the connection between application and source/sink, and the source/sink itself.

The basic use case four source/sinks is to represent hardware recording and playback. But it's not limited to that: There are various ways to create other kinds of sources and sinks. In particular, each sink has connected to it a .monitor source, which just loopbacks. Actually pavucontrol uses those to implement the sound metering display.

So settung up two loops, are even 100 loops, or tee-shaped connections with several applications listening to one application is all really straightforward.

If the GUI is not enough for you, there are also commandline applications pacmd and pactl, that allow scripting. See pacmd help or pactl help for details. (I've no idea why there are two of them...). However, their output is not particularly easy to parse, and needs a bit of fiddling with grep -A etc.

Pulseaudio includes a compatibility layer to allow all ALSA applications to use Pulseaudio, via the pulse ALSA device.
If you have an .asoundrc like

pcm.!default pulse
ctl.!default pulse

then every ALSA application will use Pulseaudio by default (unless you configure it to use a different ALSA device). Some ALSA applications think they need to use hw:... (which is bad design), and you've to convice those applications to use default instead. A few ALSA applications try to do things that only work on hw:..., and these will cause problems, but they are rare.

Bottom line: Routing sound is a lot easier with Pulseaudio (or with Jack) than with ALSA directly.