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Comment by nannal | Hacker News Reader

Is there any planned support for Linux, I'm aware of Cadmus (and can't get it to produce any noise) & Noise-torch (only turns off the mic when there's non-speech) but neither of these haven't worked to effectively filter out background noises.

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Have a look at https://sr.ht/~arsen/alsa_rnnoise/. It does noise cancellation as an Alsa plugin and in my tests effectively filtered out background noises. I have it running permanently since then and observed no drawback.

Nice! I've been using NoiseTorch, which works great but has as major downside I can't configure it to autoload, so I have to remember to set it myself after boot. There's also PulseEffects, which supposedly has an RNN plugin, but it didn't work for me when I tried it some months ago.

Does Alsa_rnnoise work well with Pulse/Pipewire systems?

(NoiseTorch maintainer here)

This is a limitation that will likely be lifted with the pipewire version. Pipewire 0.3.25 released yesterday which added some of the things we require, still some other things missing, but it seems like things are happening.

In the meantime it is possible to configure NoiseTorch as a systemd service[0], but it's not recommended because it constantly uses CPU even if no application is actually using the microphone. Afaik PipeWire uses a pull model where it pulls data when it needs it, so it shouldn't use CPU to denoise the microphone when it's not in use.

So it is currently possible to do that, but I'm deliberately not making it easy via the UI, because I don't want to deal with complaints about NoiseTorch killing people's laptop batteries or whatever.

[0]: https://github.com/lawl/NoiseTorch/wiki/Start-automatically-...

Thanks for your reply! As I use NoiseTorch, it already knows the previous configuration, which is always what I want, so the only thing i need to do is press 'load'. I risk being terribly naive, but it seems like a flag (`noisetorch --autoload` or `--loadlastconfig`) could solve this as well. Then I could just run it that way on session start. Would that be possible?

Should be possible. If someone wants to implement that, i suggest opening an issue with an implementation proposal and then send a PR.

> Does Alsa_rnnoise work well with Pulse/Pipewire systems?

I don't think so. I think that Pipewire and Pulseaudio would like to replace that part of Alsa, and I see no documentation on how to mix Alsa plugins like this (that work with the sound) with their Alsa plugins (that transports Alsa sound to the soundservers).

I would recommend PulseEffects. I switched from NoiseTorch and haven't looked back. It is a much more polished UI and has other effects if you need them. It also automatically stops doing audio processing when no apps are using the output and can easily be configured to auto-start so it can be basically set it and forget it.

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