Improving Microphone quality in Linux

Bhibb

Hey all!

So I've noticed a common complaint among those I interact with on Discord, lately. Whenever I'm booted into Linux they say I sound awful, the fan on my desk is too loud, and I sound like I'm calling from an old cellphone. I'm using a USB condenser
microphone made by TONOR.

When I switch into Windows 10 (still dual booting only for COD:MW) they say I sound much, much better.

I noticed that Discord offers 'Krisp' for the client in Windows, but not for the Linux client. I think this is the source of some of my particular woes, but I got curious to see whether or not there were any ways I could improve the quality of my microphone in Linux.

In the past, I have meddled with Jack with some success, and I was considering going back down this route (supplanting Pulse Audio). My question is thus: does anyone know of a good starting point to improve microphone quality on Linux?

nolan

pipewire?

Solarmass

I wonder how it sounds when you record via OBS or Gnome Sound Recorder app.

Bhibb

@nolan So I've heard about incompatibility with proton and other gaming stuff when it comes to pipewire. I could totally give it a shot, and it's probably worth it, but I know there may be landmines in front of me with that approach.

@Solarmass I could download OBS and give that a shot, or Gnome Sound Recorder app (didn't even know that existed, so thanks!). I'll report back.

Bhibb

You're the second person to recommend pipewire. I am intrigued, but instead I went another route. I edited my ~/.config/pulse/daemon.conf file to add some specific settings like resample-method = speex-float-# (replaced the # with the highest number in the output of pulseaudio --dump-resample-methods) and avoid-resampling = true to try to improve it. I made several other changes and can post it here, and when I compared the results of my mic (by ear) recorded in OBS Studio, I thought my config changes made a difference.

I'm happy to copy over my config if anyone wants it, but it's a pretty big config file (plus my default.pa file in the same folder).

Bhibb

Alright all, so I found this on another forum but the software is so awesome I want to share it here too: https://github.com/lawl/NoiseTorch

NoiseTorch was exactly what I needed. Noise suppression set globally across my Linux system. Awesome.

Brucehankins

Bhibb I should have remembered noise torch! They did a comparison between that and the Nvidia RTX Voice on Linux for Everyone.

seagle

Nice, I didn't know about NoiseTorch.

I use PulseEffects (which apparently now is called EasyEffects) for the same purpose: https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects
It a seems like NoiseTorch is a little simpler but PulseEffects has more features. It has a lot of plugins for in- and output. You can for example setup a noise gate and also noise reduction.

If you'd like to try it out you can install it via the official Solus repo:

sudo eopkg it pulseeffects