How can I get around the blocking of the sound card when outputting via ALSA?
I have set the output to ALSA in the music player (currently trying Strawberry) and specified my FiiO K5 Pro as the sound card. Everything is fine. However, the respective player program now blocks the sound card (Strawberry, mpv, Firefox etc.). Is there a way to work around this so that multiple sources can still be played simultaneously?
Sounds like you need to use a patchbay. I use qjackctl to route multiple inputs to multiple outputs.
Are you trying to combine multiple inputs?
That’s exactly how it is. At least I don’t want to have to close Girefox with the Netflix stream playing every time before I turn on my music player and vice versa.
Give me a little time… My setup will be most likely different than yours. I use a default null sink for my audio. I think it can be done without it.
Do you have pipewire-jack, qjackctl installed?
btw… this is a good read… a little cryptic but understandable.
Not explicitly, I only have what came with the reinstallation of EOS.
[uwe@HAL ~]$ pacman -Q pipewire-jack
pipewire-jack 1:0.3.42-2
[uwe@HAL ~]$ pacman -Q qjackctl
Fehler: Paket »qjackctl« wurde nicht gefunden
[uwe@HAL ~]$
pacman -Q pipewire-jack
pacman -Q qjackctl
Install qjackctl.
done.
I also installed alsa-oss, but that did not change anything either.
Open a terminal and type pw-jack qjackctl
A small window will open… hit the button that says graph, that should bring up a gui that will allow
you to attach open programs to your audio card.
This not a persistent connection, you’ll have to do a little homework to setup some kind of service to make it work at every boot up/login.
should look something like this but without null sink.
Yes, only Firefox and various midi codecs appear. no other open program, which I could connect to the DAC.
Hit the button that says zoom fit, if there’s another program that is sending audio, you should see it.
It should look like this.
There’s nothing other:
Somewhere Strawberry and also mpv should be visible now.
Do you have another prog sending audio?
Yes, Strwaberry and mpv together.
Are they both sending to Alsa? Switch them to Pipewire to see what happens.
Ok, now I found them all (forgot to update).
But how do I set the whole thing permanently now and get it to start itself?
I only see the other channels when they are running with Pipewire. If I set Strawberry back to ALSa, it is blocked again.
Go to the Arch wiki I linked to. There is a sample how to start a Carla patchbay. Just rewrite to work with qjackctl. I don’t have enough knowledge about your setup to write one.
Do you need Alsa? How are you using it?
edit: pipewire uses alsa… I think. 
[jmagick@DellCat ~]$ pacman -Q pipewire-alsa
pipewire-alsa 1:0.3.42-2
[jmagick@DellCat ~]$