Arctis Sound Manager

SteelSeries headset on Linux

Plug a SteelSeries Arctis headset into a Linux machine and it works as a sound card straight away: audio out, microphone in. Everything else is missing — sidetone, noise cancelling, the inactivity timer, battery level, the equalizer, the ChatMix dial, the OLED screen on the base station. On Windows those come from SteelSeries GG, and GG has no Linux build.

Arctis Sound Manager is the Linux application that fills that gap. It is free, open source (GPL-3.0), runs natively — no Wine, no vendor driver — and is built on PipeWire.

What works without it, and what does not

Works out of the box: playback and microphone, through the kernel’s USB audio driver. On recent kernels the hid-steelseries driver also reports the battery level of some wireless models.

Does not: anything GG does. The headset’s settings are sent over USB HID in a protocol of its own, and the Game / Chat split, the equalizer and ChatMix are software that runs on the PC, not in the headset. Linux has neither half until something provides it.

What Arctis Sound Manager adds

• Headset settings — sidetone, active noise cancelling and transparency, inactivity timeout, microphone volume, battery (and the spare battery in the base, or the GameBuds charging case), spoken over the headset’s own USB protocol.
• The base station’s OLED screen — the EQ of what is playing, the now-playing track, and screen-off while you are away.
• Game / Chat / Media / Aux / Output channels as real PipeWire devices, with a mixer to balance them, a Mic card for what your apps record, and automatic routing of applications — or drag an app onto a channel.
• A working ChatMix dial, with an on-screen bar like GG’s — see Arctis ChatMix on Linux.
• A Sonar-style equalizer per channel, with the Sonar game presets included and applied automatically when a game starts — see SteelSeries Sonar on Linux.
• Real 7.1 on the Game, Media and Aux channels: spatial audio through HRIR convolution on the headset, the counterpart of Sonar’s virtual surround, or surround passed straight through to a 5.1/7.1 receiver.
• Streamer mode — a second, independent mix for OBS, like Sonar’s Stream mode.
• Microphone effects — noise suppression, noise gate, compressor, and the Sonar mic presets.
• Clips — save the last 30 seconds of a game with a shortcut, one audio track per channel; see Clips.
• Stream Guard — a Discord screen share carries only the audio you allow, not the whole system.
• Desktop integration — tray icon, Plasma 6 widget, and asm-cli status.

Supported SteelSeries headsets

• Arctis Nova Pro Wireless, Nova Pro Wired, Nova Pro Omni, Nova Elite
• Arctis Nova 7 and Nova 7P (Gen 1 and Gen 2), Nova 5 Wireless, Nova 4, Nova 3 and Nova 3 Wireless
• Arctis 7, 7+, 7P, 7X, 9 Wireless, 1 Wireless, 5, Pro Wireless and Pro with GameDAC
• Arctis GameBuds

Model pages go into more detail: Nova Pro Wireless, Nova 7, Arctis 7.

Each headset is described in a YAML profile, so adding one is data rather than code; the device configuration specs explain the format. A headset ASM cannot talk to — or another brand entirely — can still use the channels, the mixer and the equalizer in generic mode.

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 and its derivatives (signed pacman repository, with the AUR as fallback), Fedora and Nobara (COPR), Debian and Ubuntu (PPA / .deb), and Bazzite, SteamOS and Silverblue through Distrobox. NixOS has its own module. The project page has the per-distribution commands if you would rather run them yourself.

Something not working? See troubleshooting.

Missing a model, or a setting that does nothing on yours? Open an issue — the hardware questions page says what to capture.

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