Hi everyone!
I’m wondering if there’s an efficient way to use both PiSound and the internal headphone output in Jack, so I could use it for in-ear monitoring without the need for an external mixer. I tried using alsa_out to register the internal RPi audio as a JACK client, but I noticed it takes quite a bit of CPU and I’m experiencing frequent clicks.
Is there a better way or is it just not possible? I also have a small Sabrent USB audio interface. Would it work better?
Probably a USB audio interface would work better. The high cpu usage when using built-in jack could possibly be because it does not support 48kHz rate, so the CPU must resample.
I’ve actually tried a while ago to do so with my Xenyx Q502USB mixer and it kinda worked. The problem is that the latency was a bit noticeable and I still got some occasional clicks so I scrapped it.
I’m currently connecting PiSound to a passive DI, while sending its thru to the Xenyx, but I would like to slim down my setup. Do I have to try to upgrade to a RPi5 or is there any other compact analog solution?
What is it exactly you are trying to do? 
We don’t see the big picture, so it’s difficult to advise.
Yeah sorry 
I was just wondering if using a RPi5 would reduce clicks and latency when using PiSound and a 48kHz audio card together (due to better performance and improvements on the USB 3 ports) or if it would be better to just stick to analog solutions.
Intuitively it might be better due to overall higher performance specs of Pi 5, but I have no empirical evidence to back this up.
Pisound does run natively on 48kHz and its multiples, so if the USB card is capable of 48kHz as well, it would immediately save some resources if all the audio devices are running at the same sampling rate.