[pulseaudio-discuss] Porting pulseaudio to Android

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Vikram Gupta at 06/07/11 15:04 did gyre and gimble:
> Thanks Colin for the quick reply.

No problem. As a small request, if possible can you post in plain text
and try not to top post. It's generally easier for people to follow
threads when replies are contextually interwoven into the appropriate
bits of messages and keeping a consistent style (plain!) is much nicer
for those of use who have to read 100s of mails from multiple projects
every day! Some mail clients can be a pain to configure this way, but if
you can, we'd appreciate it :)

Anyway, on with the reply...

> After referring to your instructions from HERE
> <http://colin.guthr.ie/2010/09/compiling-and-running-pulseaudio-from-git/>
> (Thanks for the nice explanation :) ), and giving the below mentioned
> args to configure, I have compiled the source code and its working fine
> with the compiled "paplay".
> 
> /../configure --prefix=$(pwd) --disable-x11 --disable-samplerate
> --disable-oss-output --disable-oss-wrapper --disable-coreaudio-output
> --disable-solaris --disable-jack --disable-openssl --disable-nls
> --disable-waveout --disable-glib2 --disable-gtk2 --disable-gconf
> --disable-avahi --disable-asyncns --disable-tcpwrap --disable-lirc
> --disable-hal --disable-udev --disable-bluez --disable-dbus
> --disable-hal-compat --disable-ipv6 --disable-manpages
> --disable-default-build-tests
> 
> export PULSE_SERVER=<ip>

Nice work :) Glad the instructions were useful. I'll port them across to
a good Wiki at some point when we clear the decks and get a release out....

> however, when I am playing some thing using default "aplay", the sound
> is played locally and not on the remote machine. I think that should be
> because of some configuration issue and I am looking in to it.

OK so aplay is an alsa utility. For native alsa applications to work
with pulseaudio we provide a plugin for alsa that allows it to talk to
PA. This plugin is shipped in the alsa-plugins package from
http://www.alsa-project.org/

You have to configure your alsa plugin as the "default" PCM and Control
devices for things to work.

The PerfectSetup page on the wiki outlines how to do this manually (most
distros will do this for you but you're obviously working at a low level!)

http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup

> My question is, do we have some doc which can give a list of files that
> are essential for pulse audio to work (without any optional components),
> which I can directly use in my Android Makefile or will I have to look
> for the compilation logs to figure that out?

I'm afraid I do not know of such a document (other than the PerfectSetup
link above), but if you care to write about it and blog about it, I'll
happily add any PA-related tag on your blog to a new "Pulseaudio Planet"
RSS aggregator I'm working on.

Also, feel free to create a Wiki page instead that details the steps
you've taken.

All user contributions are most welcome, whether it's in code, testing,
promotion/support or documentation in it's many forms!

As most native Android apps do not use libasound (from what I'm told by
those who actually know about Android!) this config will likely not work
for the vast majority of android apps.

Some sort of audioflinger integration would be needed to make it work
seamlessly for all 'droid apps I guess.


Cheers

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

Day Job:
  Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/]
Open Source:
  Mageia Contributor [http://www.mageia.org/]
  PulseAudio Hacker [http://www.pulseaudio.org/]
  Trac Hacker [http://trac.edgewall.org/]