Audiorelay setup on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS - Awesome FIX!

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Ubuntu 24.04 LTS AudioRelay Virtual Speaker Setup and libflac8 Issue Fix

Hi, I don’t usually write blogs, but this issue was a real pain in the ass for everyone. Since Ubuntu 23, support for libflac8 has either been dropped or messed up for some reason, and the only distro still supporting it is Debian 11. Anyway, I found a solution to this, and here’s what worked for me:

Solution for libflac8 Issue

  1. Install libflac8 manually:
    Download the package from the following link (it’s originally for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS):
    libflac8_1.3.3-2ubuntu0.2_amd64.deb

  2. Install AudioRelay as you normally would.

Now, when you connect the player from the AudioRelay server on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, you’ll notice that the virtual sink doesn’t get created automatically.

Workaround for VirtualSink Creation

Create the VirtualSpeaker (virtual sink) manually:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install pulseaudio

pulseaudio --start

sudo apt install pavucontrol


Then, load the virtual speaker module and set it as the default sink:

pactl load-module module-null-sink sink_name=VirtualSpeaker sink_properties=device.description="VirtualSpeaker"

pactl set-default-sink VirtualSpeaker


After this, in both AudioRelay and GNOME settings, select the audio device as VirtualSpeaker. Everything should work just fine now.


Make Virtual Speaker Load Automatically on Boot

To avoid manually running the above commands every time, you can make the VirtualSpeaker load on boot by creating a PulseAudio configuration file.

Create a custom PulseAudio config file: Open a terminal and run:

sudo nano /etc/pulse/default.pa

Add following at the end of the file:

load-module module-null-sink sink_name=VirtualSpeaker sink_properties=device.description="VirtualSpeaker"
set-default-sink VirtualSpeaker



This should take care of everything!