Audio Patchbay

It is a centralized hub used route sound from sources to sinks.

It is used in audio processing systems to connect sound sources to intermediary processing devices before connecting to outputs.

In Linux, JACK and PipeWire are two advanced audio drivers that provide a patchbay. PipeWire simply is a drop-in replacement for both PulseAudio and JACK by providing backends for them, alongside ALSA.

Examples

• Carla Patchbay
• qjackctl (JACK GUI based on Qt)
• qpwgraph (Pipewire Graph Manager based on Qt)
• helvum (GTK Patchbay for PipeWire)
• patchmatrix (JACK patchbay in flow matrix style)

A patchbay is different from an audio mixer.