Virtual audio sink with monitoring

Linux specific virtual audio splitting for streaming and recording on OBS, and automatic remapping of new game and audio playback sources

Requirements

If you haven't already, you should probably install pactl and pavucontrol.

I use Ubuntu so for me, to install them I use:

sudo apt install pactl pavucontrol

How to use

Before you start

So to start, check create.sh and do any changes to these 2 lines or any additions, if you want to split your audio up more into different audio tracks

create.sh

# line 71
create_isolated_sink "Discord" "Discord"
create_isolated_sink "Music" "Music"
# Add more if you need more tracks

These 2 are more than enough for me.

As for the desktop only or game only output, that was created in the earlier code in the file and anything you want being captured for your music-less/discord-less desktop output, just move any playback sources to Desktop output using PulseAudio Volume Control which was installed via pavucontrol, but also, you don't have to worry about doing this manually as the remap.sh file has a monitoring command that will do it for you automatically.

The proper how to use

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, when you want to start using the scripts, first, make sure you set the 3 bash files to be runnable as a program using these commands:

chmod +x create.sh
chmod +x remap.sh
chmod +x remove.sh

Next, you want to run ./create.sh to let it create the virtual audio devices/sinks/outputs

After that, you can either run ./remap.sh alone or you can add --start to it to let it automatically remap any new playback sources or audio sources to Desktop only output in the background.

If you made changes to the audio sinks to either create a new one or remove one/etc, then you'll have to modify these parts of the code:

remap.sh

# line 107
# Process existing apps first (skip loopbacks)
  move_all_games_to_desktop
  move_application_to_sink "Chromium" "Music"
  move_application_to_sink "OBS" "Desktop"  # I moved the OBS monitoring output
                                            # to Desktop as well because I use a
                                            # capture card to record console/second
                                            # pc/etc and I want the audio to be recorded
                                            # as well
  move_application_to_sink "WEBRTC VoiceEngine" "Discord"
  move_application_to_sink "Discord" "Discord"
  move_all_games_to_desktop

...

# line 136
# Determine target sink
local target_sink="Desktop"

if [[ "$app_name" == *"Chromium"* ]]; then
	target_sink="Music"
elif [[ "$app_name" == *"WEBRTC"* ]] || [[ "$app_name" == *"Discord"* ]]; then
	target_sink="Discord"
elif [[ "$app_name" == *"OBS"* ]] || [[ "$app_name" == *"obs"* ]]; then
	target_sink="Desktop"
elif [[ "$app_binary" == *"wine"* ]] || [[ "$app_binary" == *"preloader"* ]]; then
	target_sink="Desktop"
fi

...

# line 284
echo "=== Moving Other Apps ==="
move_application_to_sink "Chromium" "Music"
move_application_to_sink "OBS" "Desktop"
move_application_to_sink "WEBRTC VoiceEngine" "Discord"
move_application_to_sink "Discord" "Discord"

Modifying these lines of codes can also help if you want to manually set a specific app to not be recorded by OBS, such as moving Brave to the Music output (I use Noutube for my music, hence why it's using Chromium as the target source), since the remap monitoring will just undo your manual changes if you changed any output for specific playbacks via PulseAudio Volume Control

If you want to remove all of the created audio sinks/outputs, just run ./remove.sh and if you want it to stop monitoring just run ./remap.sh --stop

Note

Usually when changing your default physical audio output device, the loopback modules that are monitoring the audios from discord/desktop/games/music should automatically swap to your new default physical device, but if they don't then go onto PulseAudio Volume Control and manually change all of them once, then they'll automatically change on their own after that