chatmixd

A SteelSeries ChatMix daemon for Linux. Reads the chatmix dial off the headset's HID stream and splits audio into separate Game and Chat PipeWire/PulseAudio sinks routed to your headset.

This is a hardened fork of Birbwell/linuxmix (MIT, 2025). The most user-visible change vs. upstream is that chatmixd filters device discovery by USB vendor ID — it will not open hidraw nodes from non-SteelSeries devices. Upstream opens every /dev/hidraw* and can be fooled by reports from other gear (notably analog keyboards like the Wooting 60HE, whose per-key reports begin with 0x45 — the same byte ChatMix uses as its opcode — and cause phantom volume changes when an analog key is released). See docs/why-the-fork.md for the full diagnosis.

Requirements

• PipeWire with pipewire-pulse (PulseAudio compat layer)
• A supported SteelSeries headset with a ChatMix dial (Arctis Nova series, Arctis 7+, Nova Pro, etc.)
• pactl and pw-cli on $PATH

Install

Arch / pacman-based (AUR)

# with an AUR helper
yay -S chatmixd-git
# or paru, etc.

# or manually:
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/chatmixd-git.git
cd chatmixd-git
makepkg -si

Then enable the user service:

systemctl --user enable --now chatmixd

From source

git clone https://github.com/UMCEKO/chatmixd.git
cd chatmixd
cargo build --release
sudo install -Dm755 target/release/chatmixd /usr/bin/chatmixd
sudo install -Dm644 dist/99-chatmixd.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/99-chatmixd.rules
sudo install -Dm644 dist/chatmixd.service /usr/lib/systemd/user/chatmixd.service
sudo udevadm control --reload-rules && sudo udevadm trigger
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable --now chatmixd

After install, make sure your default sink is set to Game (e.g. in pavucontrol / hyprpanel / kde-pulse-applet).

Uninstall

systemctl --user disable --now chatmixd
sudo rm /usr/bin/chatmixd /etc/udev/rules.d/99-chatmixd.rules /usr/lib/systemd/user/chatmixd.service
sudo udevadm control --reload-rules

How it works

chatmixd polls hidraw character devices for SteelSeries vendor ID 0x1038 only. When a chatmix HID event arrives it parses (game_vol, chat_vol) from the report and runs pactl set-sink-volume against the two null sinks it creates on first event (Game and Chat). Both sinks are loopback-routed to your physical Arctis sink, so adjusting the dial changes the relative mix of the game vs chat sinks while keeping a single output device.

A blacklist file at ~/.config/chatmixd/blacklist.conf (one node name per line) lets you exclude specific PipeWire sinks from being considered as the "physical" output. It's created on first run.

Credit

Original concept and bulk of the implementation by Birbwell in linuxmix. This fork carries the vendor-ID filter, packaging changes, and a different name. The upstream MIT license is preserved.