[pulseaudio-discuss] porting pulse audio to Android

[Mark Brown]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 12:33:01PM +0100, Colin Guthrie wrote:
> 'Twas brillig, and priyanka sharma at 22/07/10 12:18 did gyre and gimble:

> > I need some help in understanding the amount of effort required to port
> > Pulse Audio to Android. Any help in this regard would be of great use to us.

> As far as the compilation etc. it shouldn't be too hard, but from what I
> understand the current reason PA is not on Android is purely from a
> licensing perspective. I believe the only GPL'ish code that is permitted
> as part of the official android stack is the kernel itself.

Just to clarify, there's no problem with handset vendors including GPLed
code if they want to (barring any licensing conflcits with other
software on the device) - the concerns purely surround what is included
by default as part of the Android platform release.

> I guess then the problems would be with how android apps interact with
> audio? I'm not sure how they actually do their output or input? I
> believe there is a separate lib on andoird for this (I don't know the
> details but others on this list do so can maybe advise better) but
> perhaps it can be adapted to work with PA rather than plain alsa?

The high level architecture is this:

	http://source.android.com/porting/audio.html

You'd end up tweaking an off the shelf ALSA libaudio to bounce via
Pulse, possibly bypassing the ALSA abstractions and talking directly to
Pulse for the data injection as well as using Pulse to configure any
soft routing it does.

> Hopefully someone can chip in with more details of how hard the porting
> would be from a wider picture perspective.

Should be fairly straightforward to get it working.