[pulseaudio-discuss] External Volume Controls

[Jerome Haltom]

Hello. Has anybody done any work regarding exposing external volume
controls?

For instance, I have a 12 channel multi-room amp system, where each
channel's volume can be independently adjusted: by sending commands
through a serial port to the amplifier itself. A sound card from my PC
would run to the amp at a constant live-level. Volume adjustment would
not happen in software.

Doing volume adjustment in software in a circumstance like this is less
than ideal. Would much rather have the exposed PulseAudio device's
volume control simply adjust the volume on the amp by sending commands
to do so down a given serial interface. The amp can support this, if I
write software to do it, of course.

So the question is has anybody done anything like this? If so, what did
you end up with? Does any existing code exist for something like this?

If not, what pointers do ya'll suggest I use to accomplish it? At most I
am sort of thinking that I'd have to develop a PulseAudio module which
would expose a virtual sink for each real sink, somehow having the
volume adjustment stuff actually manipulate the amp.

Perhaps software for virtual sinks already exists, where you can map
channels from one sink to another sink, and do silly stuff like callouts
to external applications for volume adjustment, and I could just wire
that up. Sort of doubt it, though.

Thanks for the consideration.