Walking Coffin

You did mention a “main drive”. I don’t know what’s taking all that space on your SSD but if you have a media library that takes some space you could move that to a connected HDD. While HDDs aren’t good as a boot drive it does the job well enough with most “standard” quality media. So can be said for documents and more obviously. You can then auto-mount your other drive to be inside your home directory for seemless access.

One thing that isn’t mentionned but I’ll just say this just in case. Always have external backups. I’ve scared myself way too many times thinking I had lost my main drive’s data just to find it the next day on one of my backup. Really a life saver if your setup has a problem where you find that one forum post from 12y ago with a “Nvm I fixed it” marked as [FIXED].

Other than that, thanks for sharing and with the solution at that.

Please do share. What better thing to do than to take a break from a broken install to read about someone’s own hardship with the endless quest that is maintaining a rolling-release distro.

It wasn’t clear, my bad. I meant to say that by design, on the stock OS, it wasnt meant to play multiple audio streams at once but that it was possible with some modifications either to the OS or in-app (by some ways that are beyond my knowledge).

Now that you mention it, I did see something about API level 31 some time ago and haven’t paid attention to it much. Thanks for the information.

True, I did jump into conclusion way too fast, I’ll be more careful.

My phone isn’t rooted but thanks. I have no real use for using multiple audio streams at the same times anyway. I just remembered being able to at one point, wanted to point it out and went overboard with my comment.

You may be right. However I think it might also be how most apps are written.

Disclaimer: I am no audio expert nor am I knowledgable enough in mobile OSs to confirm it but I did manage to build myself a ROM for my unsupported phone which led me to see a lot of things under the hood.

The way Android (AOSP) is made, and Im sure the same is true for iOS, easily accessible APIs are made available for devs to implement them without thinking much about how the OS on your phone will handle it. Multiple audio streams are definitely a thing on mobile OSs, for example if I want a Youtube video playing along side a phone call and music, I can. It’s just not practical if you’re an attention grabber company to let other audio streams interrupt the very important audio that they want you to listen to.

Anyway all in all, you’re right that mobile OSs are designed to only let one app access the audio channel because Google wants to keep you on Youtube, all their partners paying for their apps to get on Android want the same thing and I can imagine the same is done on iOS and other manufacturer’s OSs.