Monitoring your microphone input in your headphones (loopback) is useful for testing mic levels and checking background noise.
While there are numerous options for microphone loopback, some, like
pw-loopback, tend to experience crackling due to high CPU usage.
Using
pactl provides a stable alternative with significantly lower latency and no underrun pops.
For PipeWire users, enable microphone loopback with:
pactl load-module module-combine-sink sink_name=combine; pactl load-module module-loopback sink=combine
For PulseAudio users, the basic loopback module is sufficient:
pactl load-module module-loopback
Loopback as a Cron Job
To ensure this setting is applied at every system startup, add it as a user 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)
