protonscr

[Game recording] - clipping preview does not play back & microphone is not captured on multichannel audio interface

steamopen Steam clientAudio
ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#11569 · opened 2024-12-13 by duncte123 · updated 2025-01-20 · 3 comments · github
Dduncte123 2024-12-13 github

I am assuming the two issues mentioned in the title are somehow related.

Your system information

  • Steam client version (build number or date): 1733265492 / Mon, Dec 2 22:26 UTC -08:00
  • Distribution (e.g. Ubuntu): Kubuntu 24.04
  • Opted into Steam client beta?: No
  • Have you checked for system updates?: Yes, system is up-to-date
  • Steam Logs: steam-logs.tar.gz
  • GPU: Nvidia RTX 2080 TI

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

Expectation:
Game recording preview plays back as normal.

What is happening:
Game recording preview will not play no matter how long I wait. Steam is capturing my system audio fine but seems to have trouble picking up my microphone. It has to listen to a monitor of a pipewire sink as I have a 32 channel audio interface. This happens with both games installed from steam and external games that i need proton for.
With QPWGraph I can see that Steam is not creating an output device to play audio with, the same is true for microphone recording. Steam is not creating a sink for me to send audio from my mic to.

my assumption is that this missing output sink from steam is causing the video to not play back. My computer has "PC Main out" (see image below) set as default output device.

Steps for reproducing this issue:

  1. Have a multi-channel audio interface (I have a studiolive 32sc)
  2. Use pipewire to manage audio devices
  3. Have special sinks to manage mic and main desktop audio through a stereo pair (proton does not like getting hit with 32 channels from a single sink)
  4. Play a game with game recording always active
  5. Record all system sounds and microphone
  6. Close game and try to play the preview of the recording
  7. Open the recordings folder and attempt to play the segments with vlc (this should just work, it does for me)

"Voip in" is the microphone sink I am talking about, this is what is capturing a good feed for services like discord. Steam needs to be able to connect to the monitor of that.

image

Aaugustobmoura 2025-01-10 github

Having the same problem on Endeavour
Although, I don't have that many channels on my mic

Aaugustobmoura 2025-01-20 github

This is how I fixed my issues:

My mic not recording was actually my fault, I somehow disabled it in Steam settings (or was it disabled by default?). Enabling it again makes the audio work:

Image

The preview issue is actually related to https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/11630. I was writing my recordings to a different disk than my home directory. After I changed the recordings' location to somewhere inside my home directory, preview started working again.

I'm still writing to the extra disk since I would rather not trash my main SSD. The way I made it work is by having a bind mount to the extra disk. This is the only way to trick Steam on showing previews while still having the recordings on a secondary disk.

@duncte123 please check if you are having the same problem.

Dduncte123 2025-01-20 github

@augustobmoura thanks for your reply, my microphone is enabled in those settings. (it was as well when I reported the issue)

As for the binding of the disk, that is an unacceptable workaround to me so I'm just gonna stick with OBS for the time being.

Upstream links