[swatcoder]

> Why does the OS not provide a way to do this?

Some do.

But you need to have a strong-handed OS team that's willing to push everybody towards their most modern and highly integrated interfaces and sunset their older interfaces.

Not everybody wants that in their OS. Some want operating systems that can be pieced together from myriad components maintained by radically different teams, some want to see their API's/interfaces preserved for decades of backwards compatibility, some want minimal features from their OS and maximum raw flexibility in user space, etc

[dfc]

> Some do

Which Operating systems do this?

[jen20]

macOS has done this in recent versions. Similarly it will do all the virtual background and bokeh stuff for webcams outside of the (typically horrific) implementations in video conferencing apps.

[dahauns]

Others have already pointed out macOS/Linux, here's Windows:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/a...

[swatcoder]

As others have noted, this is trivial for most macOS and iOS apps to opt in to.

Frankly, I imagine its also available at the system level on Windows (and maybe Android and Linux) but probably only among applications that happen to be using certain audio frameworks/engines.

[beepbooptheory]

It doesn't seem to me that module-echo-cancel in Pulseaudio completely meets the requirements here (only one source), but it looks close, and seems in general like where you would implement something like this.

1. https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documen...

[hayley-patton]

I think module-null-sink and module-loopback could be used to create a virtual source which combines multiple sources, though the source/sink thing makes my head spin. Or, more simply, I suppose using the loopback of whatever audio output device does the combination (and the same mixing) for you, if you play all audio through one output device (which is most likely)?

[tetris11]

> though the source/sink thing makes my head spin

Wait, what other audio paradigms are there?

[hayley-patton]

Dunno, I meant more that it's an unintuitive way of thinking about a data-flow graph to me, moreso when introducing virtual sinks/sources.

[exe34]

so something for systemD then?