My wife wanted to play Phasmophobia and the mic wouldn’t work because the input was defaulting to the headphones but the output was to my speakers. When I switched the output to the headphones, no audio worked, input or output, at all.
iTunes does this shit too where you have to restart the app to get the audio stream to change.
Why so shitty?
Depends how the software developers implemented their audio functionality (acquiring a direct channel on the audio interface at launch, they should at least have a menu to select an alternative post-initialization). iTunes probably had that because it sets some bits about DRM compatibility, particularly for video content with Fairplay DRM, since it's such an old monolithic codebase I'm sure.
For games, I could see the decision to bypass DirectSound or something higher level where you just pipe the audio to Windows and let it resolve the default output being based on latency or something, most likely inherited from a decision made in the engine that this engine is based on decades earlier.
I don't do much with audio output in my development background, I'm sure it's just a result of requirements, timelines, and developers making something work just to get it out the door and if people aren't concerned with breaking the latency thresholds or DRM compatibility they can install a virtual audio device and set that as default, and have that go the physical interface they want. Virtual Audio Cable for instance, not sure if there's a FOSS/freeware alternative but I've had that cracked for decades.
Really? I tried switching my gaming/entertainment device to linux (I tried ubuntu and arch) and found that in contrast to windows, where configuring surround sound audio took 5 seconds to set up the driver for my card and another 10 to disable "enhancements", on linux I spent about 10 hours trying to get surround sound to work and gave up because no matter what I did the best I could get was choppy distorted sounding quadraphonic.
I did. It was still choppy and made music unlistenable. Then I tried a bunch of shit that was supposed to reduce decoding latency so that the signal would stop stopping arbitrarily and that didn't work so now I dual boot.
I've never had a surround setup but I wonder if Pipewire would help in this case. It's been a sort of miracle solution for me and some specific issues I had with PulseAudio.
hmmmm I might try this if I find a break from my other projects. Thanks!
