Virtual Audio Cable For Ubuntu

I am looking for a Virtual Audio Cable program to pipe audio through. Surely there must be a Linux version or something similar to these awesome Windows programs...

I looked and found one called vsound for Linux...

But it hasn't been updated in almost 11 years so yeah.

I had thought JACK was the answer, but it is rather difficult to use. I mainly want a virtual soundcard that works in conjunction with a hardware soundcard.

3 Answers

One virtual audio cable (VAC), that's free, open source and works on Linux, Windows and OSX is jackaudio.

You can download the source code from here on the jackaudio website

You can install it via apt-get:

sudo apt-get install jack

A GUI tool to use with it is qjackctl

sudo apt-get install qjackctl

See also this blog post for more information

To make virtual audio devices that work like virtual audio cables, you can use PulseAudio commands. I make a pair of them to allow two software defined radio apps (eg: WSJT-X or JS8Call) to communicate bidirectionally with each other for testing purposes without needing any hardware:

pactl load-module module-virtual-sink sink_name=VAC_1to2
pactl load-module module-virtual-sink sink_name=VAC_2to1

The device names after sink_name are arbitrary, just make them unique.

In app1:

• Input device: VAC_2to1.monitor
• Output device: VAC_1to2

In app2:

• Input device: VAC_1to2.monitor
• Output device: VAC_2to1

Create a Virtual Microphone on Linux with Pulseaudio...