[pulseaudio-discuss] Multiple remote sinks

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Svein Halvor Halvorsen at 31/01/09 01:45 did gyre and 
gimble:
> Hi,
> 
> I have an old laptop hooked up to my living room stereo laying on top of 
> my amp, running a pulseaudio server (module-native-protocol-tcp). It 
> announces its presence by module-zeroconf-publish.
> 
> So on my laptop and desktop computers I run pulseaudio locally as well 
> as padevchooser, and somehow I can select my stereo as my output. (Using 
> some magic I don't know).
> 
> I've now added yet another pulseaudio server connected to my kitchen 
> stereo, and setup the same way my living room server. Now I can select 
> the kitchen too, as my sink.
> 
> My question is: How can I select to output to one, the other, or both 
> servers, as quickly and easily as padevchooser lets me select one of the 
> two?

First of all padevchooser is dead! It's use is generally not promoted.

On each of the machines that you actually run stuff on (e.g. your 
desktop) you want to run the mozule-zeroconf-discover module (you can 
enable this via papref's "Make discovered network sinks available 
locally" (or something like that!).

This will add a new sink to your local pulseaudio that will be treated 
just like another local sound card.

When you play sound on your local machine, simply fire up pavucontrol 
and then find the stream you want to move to the kitchen, and either 
right click or use the little drop down menu thing to select the kitchen 
sink (pun fully intended ;))


Sadly there is no handy gui way to output to both sinks at the same 
time... you can do it but you'll need to load a module-combine with the 
correct sink names to create another local virtual sink that copies 
audio to both devices. This will send the same data to both sinks which 
you could argue is not efficient. An alternative to that is to use the 
RTP modules to multicast the data instead.

Hope this helps.

Col


-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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