Use several audio instances (skype, mumble, browser) and map them into the jack world.
Imaging you are recording a podcast with a remote speaker connected to you by some VoIP application like Skype or Mumble. VoIP clients usually come with a Pulseaudio backend and show up as Pulseaudio streams. Pulseaudio has a jack sink and source bridge modules that can transfer audio streams from jack to pulseaudio and vice versa.
Unfortunately you can load the bridge modules only once, so that you are limited to one audio stream per direction. Here a simple shell script is used to circumvent this problem.
As we said, you can only load one instance of the jack pulseaudio bridge modules, but this bridge can have an arbitrary numbers of channels. Pulseaudio furthermore has a remap module that can map channels of one sink into channels of a new virtual sink. That's all we need.
The shell script sets up a jack sink or source respectively with the needed numbers of channels. Then it adds virtual sinks or sources and remaps channels to the bridge sink or source.
The following ubuntu packages or equivalent
- pulseaudio-utils
and of course some jackd installation.
It's a hack and it assumes that you have basic hacking skills. Go through
jack-pulseaudio-bridge.sh and search for the comment string CONFIG. The
comments there should explain, how to configure the shell script.
Run it after jackd is started. Then your pulseaudio sinks and sources should show up. You can route your audio streams to them.