Audio Accessibility : Force Mono

Bazzite
1

Been trying out Bazzite and enjoying poking around. One obstacle I’ve come across is that neither the Sound or Accessibility sections in Settings offer the option to force mono.
Having hearing loss in one ear, this makes games/movies with surround an issue.
Do I need to do some console magic with Pulseaudio or ALSA to get it done?

edit: Using the desktop edition, not deck :slight_smile:

2

Hi! I found this thread and based on the answers, you could either use EasyEffects to modify your current sink or create a new sink for mono output.

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3

Yeah, EasyEffects seems to be the common solution, though EE warns/recommends not using it as the default audio output source in Settings.

I used to just force mono in Alsa-mixer in other distros.

As long as it works for now I’ll just settle with Easy Effects and see if there’s a downside in latency or otherwise.

4

I was able to create mono audio playback device in Aurora like this:

  1. Copy /usr/share/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf to ~/.config/pipewire/
  2. Switch to audio device you want to use for mono audio playback
  3. Get current audio playback device sink name by running pactl get-default-sink
  4. Edit ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf, find pulse.cmd block and add module-remap-sink line as shown below.
    Replace YOUR-SINK-NAME-HERE placeholder with device name from previous step.
    ...
pulse.cmd = [
    { cmd = "load-module" args = "module-always-sink" flags = [ ] }
    { cmd = "load-module" args = "module-device-manager" flags = [ ] }
    { cmd = "load-module" args = "module-device-restore" flags = [ ] }
    { cmd = "load-module" args = "module-stream-restore" flags = [ ] }
    { cmd = "load-module" args = "module-remap-sink master=YOUR-SINK-NAME-HERE sink_name=mono sink_properties=\"device.description='Mono'\" channels=1 channel_map=mono" flags = [ ] }
    #{ cmd = "load-module" args = "module-switch-on-connect" }
    #{ cmd = "load-module" args = "module-gsettings" flags = [ nofail ] }
]
...
  5. Reboot
1 Like
5

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