Arctis Sound Manager

Arctis 7 on Linux

The Arctis 7 is one of the most common SteelSeries headsets on Linux, and one of the easiest: plug in the dongle and it shows up as a sound card, sometimes as two. What it lacks is everything SteelSeries Engine and GG handled on Windows — sidetone, the battery level, the auto-off timer, and an equalizer.

Arctis Sound Manager (ASM) speaks the headset’s own USB protocol and brings those back, natively — no Wine, no vendor driver.

What you get

Arctis 7 (2017 and 2019) and Arctis Pro 2019

• Sidetone
• Auto-off timer
• Battery level
• The ChatMix dial, read live

Arctis 7+ family

All of the above, plus microphone volume, the brightness of the microphone’s mute LED, the mute state, and whether the headset is charging.

Audio, on PipeWire — every model

• Game / Chat / Media / Output channels as real sound devices, with a mixer and automatic routing of applications
• ChatMix balancing Game against Chat — see Arctis ChatMix on Linux
• A Sonar-style equalizer per channel, with GG’s game presets — see SteelSeries Sonar on Linux
• Spatial audio through HRIR convolution
• Microphone noise suppression, noise gate and compressor

Which models

• Arctis 7 (USB ID 1038:1260) and Arctis 7 2019 (1038:12ad)
• Arctis Pro 2019 (1038:1252)
• Arctis 7+, including the PS5, Xbox and Destiny editions

The supported devices page lists every USB ID; the Arctis Pro Wireless and Arctis Pro with GameDAC have profiles of their own. To check yours:

lsusb | grep 1038

Getting it

curl -fsSL https://loteran.github.io/Arctis-Sound-Manager/install.sh | bash

The script detects your distribution and installs the native package — Arch, Fedora, Nobara, Debian, Ubuntu, Bazzite and SteamOS are covered. The project page has the per-distribution commands.

Something not working? The troubleshooting page covers the common cases.

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