It seems my mic is picking up my desktop audio. I’m not really sure how to attack this issue so I’m hoping someone here might have some ideas. I have a pair of 3.5mm earbuds plugged into an splitter which is then plugged into the headphone and mic ports in my mobo. I’m unsure how long this issue has persisted; I usually use push to talk in Discord but recently switched to voice activation and had someone point this out to me. I did some testing to hopefully help narrow things down:
My first thought was the audio leakage was just getting picked up by the inline mic
The volume of the audio being picked up doesn’t get louder if I move the earbud closer to the mic.
But the volume does get louder/quieter depending on the volume of the desktop audio.
I think leakage can be ruled out.
To eliminate these specific earbuds as a possibility I plugged in a pair of earbuds that don’t have a microphone. The issue persists. If anything the audio comes through even clearer.
I lack a second splitter to test with so I couldn’t check that.
Moving other electronics away from the cable made no difference.
I booted into Windows 10 with all the same hardware and found that the issue does not occur in Windows.
So it seems specific to my EndeavourOS and probably not an issue with my mobo, splitter, or earbuds.
The issue persists across all applications I checked - Discord, OBS, Audacity, and pavucontrol all detect the audio.
This rules out me messing up the settings in just one program.
The issue stops if I keep the input and change the output device
The issue also stops if I keep the output and change the input device
Carla is the only utility I can think of which might have affected the audio, but it’s already uninstalled along with its dependencies and I don’t remember making any changes while it was installed.
And that’s where I’m at with this so far; I have no clue what setting could be causing this and I’ve exhausted what testing I could think to do. Any advice would be appreciated. Let me know if you need any additional details.
My desktop USB mic is the “G-Track” and my 3.5mm shows up as the “Starship/Matisse” one. The Starship one is also the one that’s picking up my desktop audio. So yes that would stop the desktop audio from being broadcast to Discord, but it would also mean I can’t use my 3.5mm microphone because I just muted it. Here are my 3 configs too if it helps
It’s maybe worth noting that Starship is both an output and input - it seems to control all of my 3.5mm ports - two mics, two headphones, and a line in - one set in front and one set in rear.
It’s already on Analog Duplex Stereo in that image. It’s the only one that gives me usable sound - both input and output.
Analog Stereo Input fixes the loopback, but eliminates my 3.5mm output
Analog Stereo Output removes my 3.5mm mic as an input.
The two Digital Output + Analog Input options fix the loopback, but I can’t hear any audio via 3.5mm
The various Analog Surround + Analog Input options give fine audio output but garbled audio input
Pro Audio gives good output, but the input device shows no activity
As for the input options on the Starship input device it’s just front mic, rear mic, and line in. Only one of those has my actual cable plugged into the physical port, which is rear mic. I could change which port the device points to of course, but then I can’t use the mic because it isn’t plugged into any of those ports. Line in produces no audio when plugged into so I can’t use it. I tried plugging into the front just now to test, but I get the same results as the rear.
Any update on this topic? Did you find a solution?
I’ve got the same problem and it’s very annoying. I tried all the settings with pavucontrol and alsamixer, but none of these solve the issue.
Maybe the problems come from pipewire and pulseaudio-qt conflicting, but I couldn’t try removing pulseaudio since various KDE applications depend on it.
Unfortunately I don’t have any updates for you really. This is still an issue for me. I’ve just resigned myself to using a USB mic to sidestep the problem.
