From jamshark70 at zoho.com  Mon Sep  8 05:26:33 2025
From: jamshark70 at zoho.com (James Harkins)
Date: Mon, 08 Sep 2025 13:26:33 +0800
Subject: [ubuntu-studio-users] Preserve PipeWire connections even when the
 app (unnecessarily) closes/reopens its ports?
Message-ID: <19927ca4cbc.eb31fece4549.4142485280416361299@zoho.com>

I do a lot of my writing using an old NaturallySpeaking installation, running in VirtualBox. This means I am frequently opening and closing the microphone in NaturallySpeaking / VirtualBox.

In qpwgraph, I see that every time I open the microphone, the "PipeWire ALSA [VirtualBox] Capture" device disappears for a moment, and then reappears. Oddly, the capture device does not disappear when turning off the mic -- even when dictation is paused in NaturallySpeaking, capture device remains active and connected. It's only when re-enabling dictation that the device blips out.

This wouldn't be a problem, except that the noise level from the headset microphone is really not quite usable, and seems to be getting worse. I would like to insert some audio processing between the hardware mic device and this capture device. But I can't, because every time the capture thingy gets re-created, it resets to default connections. So any other software I put in the middle gets disconnected.

Best way to deal with this?

I guess a session manager could be an option, but I don't need it to control anything except for the specific software/devices. (Never needed a session manager before, so I'm unfamiliar with different tools strengths/weaknesses.)

Or, my SuperCollider script needs to monitor the connection status continuously?

TIA,
James