[pulseaudio-discuss] trying to use pulseaudio with esound-sink on ubuntu desktop 8.04

[Sean McNamara]

Hi,

Just to confirm, what you're trying to do:

1. Run an esd server on an openwrt router.
2. Run a pulseaudio server on Ubuntu 8.04.
3. Use pulseaudio server to pass pulseaudio clients' output over to
the router's esd server, so the router (I guess) plays sound.

If by "mixed result" you mean that the sound plays choppy, then
consider your observation duly confirmed on my end. I am running
Ubuntu 9.04 alpha, with pulseaudio and esd both running on localhost.

It appears that module-esound-sink is defective by design; the attempt
to stream to esound from pulseaudio is complicated by their
differences in buffering metrics and latency. I doubt
module-esound-sink has received much work over the past few revisions
of pulseaudio; the situation is the same from PA 0.9.10 (your ver) to
0.9.14 (my ver).

But hey -- since OpenWRT is, like, "open" -- why not build Pulseaudio
for the OpenWRT platform? :) Even if you have native esd clients that
you need to support, pulseaudio is much better at accepting esound
clients than piping data from PA to a real esound server.

You could try messing with the buffering on the esound or pulseaudio
side, but changing pulseaudio's default-fragment-size-msec and
default-fragments didn't yield any results for me :(

In summary:

*I have confirmed that the playback is choppy with this setup
*I would say that it is on the pessimistic half of likely that any of
the PA developers would want to fix this path, as its use is already
discouraged in the documentation here
http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/Modules#module-esound-sink
*A workaround might be to deploy PulseAudio on OpenWRT

HTH,

Sean

On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 10:33 AM, Misha Koshelev <mk144210 at bcm.edu> wrote:
> I've attached my /etc/pulse/default.pa. Having mixed result. Running
> esound on openwrt server with:
>
> esd -tcp -public -promiscuous
>
> Thank you
> Misha
>
> --
> Misha Koshelev
> MD/PhD Student
> Cooper laboratory
>
> One Baylor Plaza, Room 268B
> Baylor College of Medicine
> Houston, TX 77030
> (713) 798-5021
> fax (713) 798-5838
>
>
> #!/usr/bin/pulseaudio -nF
> #
> # This file is part of PulseAudio.
> #
> # PulseAudio is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
> # under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by
> # the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
> # (at your option) any later version.
> #
> # PulseAudio is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
> # WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
> # MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
> # General Public License for more details.
> #
> # You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License
> # along with PulseAudio; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation,
> # Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA.
>
> .nofail
>
> ### Load something into the sample cache
> #load-sample-lazy x11-bell /usr/share/sounds/gtk-events/activate.wav
> load-sample-lazy pulse-hotplug /usr/share/sounds/startup3.wav
> #load-sample-lazy pulse-coldplug /usr/share/sounds/startup3.wav
> #load-sample-lazy pulse-access /usr/share/sounds/generic.wav
>
> .fail
>
> ### Load audio drivers statically (it's probably better to not load
> ### these drivers manually, but instead use module-hal-detect --
> ### see below -- for doing this automatically)
> load-module module-esound-sink server="192.168.1.2" sink_name=router
> #load-module module-alsa-sink
> #load-module module-alsa-source device=hw:1,0
> #load-module module-oss device="/dev/dsp" sink_name=output source_name=input
> #load-module module-oss-mmap device="/dev/dsp" sink_name=output source_name=input
> #load-module module-null-sink
> #load-module module-pipe-sink
>
> ### Automatically load driver modules depending on the hardware available
> .ifexists module-hal-detect.so
> load-module module-hal-detect
> .else
> ### Alternatively use the static hardware detection module (for systems that
> ### lack HAL support)
> load-module module-detect
> .endif
>
> ### Load several protocols
> .ifexists module-esound-protocol-unix.so
> load-module module-esound-protocol-unix
> .endif
> load-module module-native-protocol-unix
>
> ### Network access (may be configured with paprefs, so leave this commented
> ### here if you plan to use paprefs)
> #load-module module-esound-protocol-tcp
> #load-module module-native-protocol-tcp
> #load-module module-zeroconf-publish
>
> ### Load the RTP reciever module (also configured via paprefs, see above)
> #load-module module-rtp-recv
>
> ### Load the RTP sender module (also configured via paprefs, see above)
> #load-module module-null-sink sink_name=rtp format=s16be channels=2 rate=44100 description="RTP Multicast Sink"
> #load-module module-rtp-send source=rtp.monitor
>
> ### Automatically restore the volume of playback streams
> load-module module-volume-restore
>
> ### Automatically restore the default sink/source when changed by the user during runtime
> load-module module-default-device-restore
>
> ### Automatically move streams to the default sink if the sink they are
> ### connected to dies, similar for sources
> load-module module-rescue-streams
>
> ### Automatically suspend sinks/sources that become idle for too long
> load-module module-suspend-on-idle
>
> ### Load X11 bell module
> #load-module module-x11-bell sample=x11-bell
>
> ### Register ourselves in the X11 session manager
> # Deactivated by default, to avoid deadlock when PA is started as esd from gnome-session
> # Instead we load this via /etc/xdg/autostart/ and "pactl load-module" now
> # load-module module-x11-xsmp
>
> ### Load additional modules from GConf settings. This can be configured with the paprefs tool.
> ### Please keep in mind that the modules configured by paprefs might conflict with manually
> ### loaded modules.
> .ifexists module-gconf.so
> .nofail
> load-module module-gconf
> .fail
> .endif
>
> ### Publish connection data in the X11 root window
> .ifexists module-x11-publish.so
> .nofail
> load-module module-x11-publish
> .fail
> .endif
>
> ### Make some devices default
> set-default-sink router
> #set-default-source input
>
> _______________________________________________
> pulseaudio-discuss mailing list
> pulseaudio-discuss at mail.0pointer.de
> https://tango.0pointer.de/mailman/listinfo/pulseaudio-discuss
>
>