Full day today, and not bad at all for a Monday where it felt incredibly early when the alarm went off. Once again, it took less than a week of holiday to feel like I had been away from the regular morning routine for ages.
Inbetween other things, I got the chance to investigate my voquestion from a week ago. It is definitely is a Vocaster feature to feed all audio into its output, which with my regular setup of choosing the Vocaster as both my input and output results in all audio produced by my computer being routed to anyone who is listening. There is a separate volume for loopback audio which seems to include my unwanted sounds, but killing that also kills all the audio I want to hear, so that is out too.
I quickly ruled out my first idea: that I had at some point set up a virtual sound interface routing everything to Zoom (using Loopback) and promptly forgotten about it. No strange setups there, and not elsewhere in the system either, so back to staring at the Vocaster it was.
So far, actual manuals and other official information have only provided one possible lead: the Vocaster has two loopback interfaces, so it is possible that some selective audio routing could solve the problem. I discussed a bit with Lars, however, and perhaps a better option is to be selective about what audio I send to the Vocaster. It feels a bit fuzzy to try and just think about, but perhaps I should send only the audio of the current application (the voice chat app of the moment, typically) to the Vocaster, and keep system audio in general going somewhere else?
But, then I would have to make sure that "somewhere else" is a carefully muted place so I am not suddenly getting notifications shouted through speakers or something …
I would vastly prefer to solve this by using fewer things, rather than adding more settings on top of each recording situation. And it still feels strange that this should be something not clearly written about and easily switchable on or off.
Hopefully, I am still either asking the wrong questions, or missing something extremely obvious.