Monitoring your own voice through a microphone, called loopback, can serve as a valuable tool for self-awareness.
While there are numerous options for microphone loopback, some, like pw-loopback, tend to experience crackling due to high CPU usage. Unfortunately, my attempts to find a solution for the pw-loopback crackling issue were unsuccessful.
However, I stumbled upon a powerful audio management tool for Fedora: pactl. Pactl serves as a much better alternative pw-loopback.
For PipeWire users, the following command can be used to enable microphone loopback:
pactl load-module module-combine-sink sink_name=combine; pactl load-module module-loopback sink=combine
For PulseAudio users, the following command will suffice:
pactl load-module module-loopback
Loopback as a Cronjob
To ensure this setting is applied at every system startup, it can be added as a cron job.
crontab -e
If you're using PipeWire, add the following line to your crontab:
@reboot (pactl load-module module-combine-sink sink_name=combine; pactl load-module module-loopback sink=combine)
If you're using PulseAudio, add the following line to your crontab:
@reboot (pactl load-module module-loopback)
