Media Management

Managing microphones, cameras, speakers, and media tracks in Pipecat client applications.

The Pipecat client handles media at two levels: local devices (the user’s mic, camera, and speakers) and media tracks (the live audio/video streams flowing between client and bot). This page covers how to work with both.

Bot audio output

---

Microphone

Enabling and muting

Set enableMic: true in the constructor to start the session with the mic active. This is the default:

const client = new PipecatClient({
  transport: new DailyTransport(),
  enableMic: true,
});

Switching microphones

---

Camera

Camera is disabled by default. Enable it in the constructor:

const client = new PipecatClient({
  transport: new DailyTransport(),
  enableCam: true,
});

Not all transports support video. enableCam has no effect on transports that don’t support it (e.g. WebSocket).

---

Speakers

---

Device initialization before connecting

By default, device access is requested when connect() is called. If you want to enumerate or test devices before the session starts — for example, to show a device picker pre-call — call initDevices() first:

await client.initDevices();
// devices are now available; user hasn't connected yet
const mics = await client.getAllMics();

---

Media tracks

For advanced use cases — custom rendering, audio processing, recording — you can access the raw MediaStreamTrack objects directly.

---

Audio visualization

---

API reference