[pulseaudio-discuss] A pulseaudio appliance

[Jon Smirl]

On 10/4/07, Andrzej Wasowski <wasowski at data.pl> wrote:
> On Thu, 4 Oct 2007, Jon Smirl wrote:
>
> >> That's still not within spec.  He wanted something to stream audio
> >> data to.  The mpd solution requires you to have the audio data on the
> >> disk connected to the NSLU, correct.  I guess you could read it over
> >> the network, but it's not the same thing as having a remote sound card
> >> for your laptop.
> >
> > NFS mount the laptop.
>
> As I said I run pulseaudio on NSLU + wireless + a USB audio.  This is nice
> as  I can share the audio connection with all laptopt in house + a local
> mpd on NSLU.  The downside, already mentioned before, is that the setup is
> not really stable. In particular:
>
> * I need to ocassionally restart pulseaudio or alsa, or the whole machine
>    as no sound is coming out.
>
> * NSLU does not seem to have enough power to handle mixing multiple
>    streams at the same time.  Only noises come out if more than one stream
>    is being played.  Most often one needs to restart pulseaudio whenever
>    this happens in order to be able to play any streams properly again.
>
> * Also the quality degrades (jitters) if some other
>    process starts to compete for cycles wit pulseaudio at NSLU.

It is likely that all of this is caused by using floating point in
pulse. mpd has been reworked to be integer only. I'm running five
simultaneous stereo channels of mpd and only using 60% of the CPU.

It is fairly complex to rewrite audio software to use only integers.
You'd also want to leave pulse using the FPU when it is available.

Have you modified your slug to run at 266Mhz instead of the default
133Mhz? It is simple to do.

-- 
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl at gmail.com