It’s an Arctis Nova 7. It’s intended to be used with a program called Steelseries GG that manages EQ profiles for the headset, as well as spatial audio, with some proprietary thing called Sonar. It also includes a mixer for managing multiple audio sources. I find the whole thing to be pretty nifty. But what I’m worried about is losing this functionality if/when I move from Windows to Linux, apparently that specific program doesn’t have Linux support. Does anyone have any experience with this or something similar?
I have a Nova 7 as well. The good thing is that the settings are saved into the headset itself, so you can just set it to how you like in Windows and have it be remembered in Linux.
I setup a small Windows VM and I passthrough the USB device whenever I need to change the settings, but I haven’t needed to do that since I got the headset a year and a half ago. Of course, if you need to constantly change settings, yeah it is less than ideal.
I’ve got an Arctis 7 myself and it works just fine in Linux, no special drivers or anything needed. However, there are a bunch of features in their proprietary app which I used for all of a few minutes on a Windows machine (I think there was an equaliser in there?) and that might work in Linux under Wine… but I’m not sure as I’ve never bothered.
Can speak to this slightly. I tried to get their app to run via Wine, and it did not work just “plug and play” at least. Tried to find a guide or some alternative option. After about 15 min of searching, I decided that “eh, it works great out of the box” and started using easy effects for an EQ instead.
Pulseaudio, pipewire, jack, even alsa all have equalisers.
Everything works just fine sound wise but the chatwheel doesn’t work at all. So the changing the volume between your game and discord or some other chat app. Won’t work. Also you can set up their buttons and feedback sensitivity that can be done on windows and it will be saved in the hardware.
chatwheel
If it emits some signal the OS recognizes it’s possible to bind that to some action, hack a script.
Maybe but the way it it works is the software creates a virtual mixer with two virtual sound devices that you set one to your game hand one to your chat program then the chat wheel balances between the two. The virtual sound devices are created by their software not the device driver. It could be done but I don’t think enough people are enough to write that code.
I haven’t tried it, but check this out:
My wireless steel series worked with no extra effort.
It also includes a mixer for managing multiple audio sources.
Isn’t that just a normal part of the/any operating system?
Well, in this case you can have different audio profiles for each channel.