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by vel0city 1402 days ago
As for multiple headsets to one device, a lot of devices have challenges playing a certain audio stream to multiple output devices. For instance, my laptop has a speaker and my monitor has a speaker. There's no default way in Windows to play the same audio out on both of these outputs. I would need software to emulate a sound device and end up duplicating the stream to both other sound devices to target both outputs at once. Its been a while but I think that's also true on MacOS, its true for the defaults of a lot of Linux distros, its true on Android. You might have issues outputting to multiple headsets depending on your chipset, but the first level limitation is really more on the operating system side of things.

As for "can't connect multiple devices to one headset", as mentioned by others you can do this if you get the right hardware. I have a few headsets which support multipoint.
1 comments
viraptor 1402 days ago
> its true for the defaults of a lot of Linux

Not anymore. New distributions have moved to pipewire audio, so since about this year you can open qjackctl, Carla or any of the audio routing apps and drag and drop audio from a chosen app to any number of outputs. (not sure if you'd count not built into the traybar mixer panel as default or not)

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vel0city 1402 days ago
Not all distributions have made the change for the defaults to pipewire. Ubuntu 22.10 (the latest LTS release of Ubuntu) still uses ALSA as the default, as just a quick example. It can still be changed easily enough.

And yeah, there are apps like qjackctl and Carla and others which do let you do this kind of mixing. But yeah, I'm talking about the basic sound settings that most users are going to instinctually mess with and make quick changes. As mentioned, there are software stacks that will let you mix inputs and outputs on Windows using synthetic devices, but that's not the natively exposed tools present on a standard install. On most modern Linux distros, you could get it done with some fancy CLI work out of the box, or you'll want to install tools like qjackctl.

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viraptor 1402 days ago
You're looking at the wrong layer. Pipewire replaces pulseaudio, not alsa. And it's included in 22.10 by default.

I expect that soon the extra features are going to hit the default mixers too - we just need a bit of time for that.

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