[pulseaudio-discuss] Mute and unmute individual sinks in a module-combine

[Timothy J Massey]

Hello!

Still working on my multi-zone setup.  The goal is to have multiple 
instances of MPD playing, and being able to be routed to 0 or more zones 
simultaneously.  Each player is connected to a unique sink created with 
module-combine, with each of these combined sinks including *all* of the 
physical sinks.  Something like this:

#Physical sinks for actual hardware
load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:1,0 sink_name=zone1
load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:2,0 sink_name=zone2 
load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:3,0 sink_name=zone3 
#Module-combine sinks for handling each MPD
load-module module-combine sink_name=mpdplayer1 slaves=zone1,zone2,zone3
load-module module-combine sink_name=mpdplayer2 slaves=zone1,zone2,zone3
load-module module-combine sink_name=mpdplayer3 slaves=zone1,zone2,zone3

For now, I have a single instance of MPD playing through sink mpdplayer1. 
When I start up MPD and play something, I get audio out of all three 
sinks.  So far, so good.

Now, though, I would like to mute the sound in all but one of the zones. I 
can't simply do something like:

set-sink-mute zone2
set-sink-mute zone3

Because that would mute the outputs for those zones, and they might be 
(and likely are) playing music from one of the other MPD sessions.  What I 
want to do is tell the module-combined sink (mpdplayer1) to only send 
audio to one of the sinks and to mute the output to the other two sinks.

Is this possible?  I cant seem to find a way to interact with the 
individual channels within a module-combine...

Tim Massey