[pulseaudio-discuss] Help in setting up PA

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Sun, Jan 20, 2008 at 02:49:25PM -0500, Richard Geddes wrote:
> Thanks for the response.
> 
> Currently, I'd like to use PA as a replacement for esound... to
> basically send audio from different programs and from my audio capture
> card to my audio playback card (capture and playback are on the same
> card), taking advantage of mixing and syncing features of PA.   Sending
> sound packets out to the network is interesting and I'd like to try that
> later.
> 
> Here's the uncommented part of my /etc/pulse/default.pa file:

The things that you wrote and pasted to your last message
looked a lot like you were experimenting with the rtp
modules, so I guess this is a different version of the file?
If not, then that would be really strange behaviour (the RTP
activity), I think. I haven't played with networking stuff
at all myself, though.

Anyway, I'll go through the file and give some comments.

> #!/usr/bin/pulseaudio -nF
> 
> .ifexists /usr/lib/pulse-0.9/modules/module-hal-detect.so
> load-module module-hal-detect
> .else
> load-module module-detect
> .endif

Here you have sound card autodetection set up. I think it's
not compatible with the autoload stuff here:

> add-autoload-sink output module-alsa-sink device=hw:0 sink_name=output
> add-autoload-source input module-alsa-source device=hw:0 source_name=input

Do you have a hotpluggable sound card, or why are these
autoload entries here? module-hal-detect should take care of
the hotplugging stuff, so I think the autoload feature is
deprecated or for those cases when you do not want to use
HAL. I'm not sure about the last statement. Anyway, if you
don't have any special reason for these, remove them.

> .ifexists /usr/lib/pulse-0.9/modules/module-esound-protocol-unix.so
> load-module module-esound-protocol-unix
> .endif

With this line you should have support for esound
applications (assuming that the module is installed on the
system). You said that you wanted to replace esd. This
should achieve that goal (along with the
pulseaudio-esound-compat package, be sure to have that
installed too).

However, with this being the only loaded protocol, now your
system doesn't support anything but esound apps. So add
"load-module module-native-protocol-unix" too to have better
application support. This will allow native pulse clients to
connect. If you want support for applications using alsa as
the interface (and why wouldn't you?), see the instructions
at
http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup#ALSAApplications.
Or maybe you've done that already.

Rest of the file seemed to be fine.

If problems arise, output of pulseaudio -vv will be useful.

-- 
Tanu Kaskinen