[pulseaudio-discuss] Sending audio from source to multiple sinks dynamically

[Maarten Bosmans]

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 2:08 AM, Timothy J Massey <tmassey at obscorp.com> wrote:
> From what I can tell, with PA you can pick only which (single) sink a
> source is connected to.  If you pick a new sink for the source, it is
> removed from whatever sink it was using before.  And AFAICT, if you want
> to have a source play via more than one sink, the only way to do this is
> to create a virtual sink that is a combination of more than one sink.  Is
> this correct?  It's not really practical to create a virtual sink for each
> of the possible combinations of e.g. 8 different sinks...
>
> I'm looking for a more flexible structure.  I would like to be able to
> connect a sink to a source, and leave whatever other sinks that might
> already be playing from that source *alone*.  For example, if I'm
> listening to MPD#1 in the living room, and I start moving between the
> living room and the kitchen, I want to be able to select MPD#1 in the
> kitchen *and* leave it undisturbed in the living room.  Then, if someone
> moves into the living room and switches it to MPD#2, I want my playback in
> the kitchen undisturbed.

There is some talk on the list once in a while about a way to connect
sources and sinks directly, i.e. with a proper module and not
resorting to hacks like (pacat | pacat).

If someone would code such a module the zone-mixer setup would be very
easy. Probably something like having a null sink for every MPD and the
connecting the null sink monitor sources to any zone sink. This would
offer the most flexibility and hopefully also without any delay
between the different zones.