[pulseaudio-discuss] PulseAudio on MacOSX

[Daniel Mack]

On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 03:21:37AM -0400, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
> I'm wondering the status of PA on OSX. The latest SSE commits cause the
> compile to fail, but checking out a revision before those compiles fine.
> Unfortunately, it segfaults when running. What's the timeline for OSX
> support in PA?
> 
> Essentially, I'm trying to play sound from my linux box on the speakers of
> my Macbook with proper latency. PA supports this well on Linux, sort of
> supports it on Windows, but what's going on with OSX support?

There was some movement a couple of weeks ago when patches were merged
to at least make the sources compile on OS X. But then there was a
linkage problem which made the binaries crash right upon startup.

Kim Lester posted some more patches which were commented but eventually,
the thread died. The problem with that patchset was merely that it
wasn't split up into small pieces at functional barriers, and that it
offended the coding style rules.

> Would you recommend I use rtp-send? Is there a reliable way to play these
> streams on OSX? Is there a way to reduce the multicast's packet storms
> (which crash my router)? Or what about using PA's raop sink and making OSX
> emulate airtunes? Unfortunately, PA doesn't seem to support Airfoil. Links
> and whatnot are in this blog entry: http://blog.jasondonenfeld.com/188 .
> 
> Anyone have suggestions? How can I play audio from linux out of speakers on
> OSX via PulseAudio?

Dig in the archives for that bigger patch Kim sent a month ago and see
if you're able to clean it up. That would be a great help.

Apart from that, there is roughly two big sites left for development.

One is a kernel extension that registeres a virtual audio device which
can be selected as sound sink for CoreAudio enabled applications. The
kernel driver loops that data back to user space where is caugth and
sent to a configured PA server. This is what I started with, but
unfortunately, I currently lost track due to many other things I'm
working on. I'll get back to that soon.

The other big thing is a PA server module that allows to use CoreAudio
devices to be used as audio sink and source. That shouldn't be hard to
do as there are similar code sniplets around in other free software
projects (like xine, mplayer and the like). But nobody currently cares.
Would that be something you could help with?

And in general, it's a good idea to read thru the thread which was
taking place like a month ago, that should give you a good picture about
the status quo.

Daniel