[pulseaudio-discuss] Simultaneous output to local and remote sound cards

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Sergey M. at 13/06/11 05:57 did gyre and gimble:
> Hello. I am trying to make simultaneous output to local and remote sound
> cards (i.e. to stream sound from my notebook both to notebook speakers
> and to remote pc with hi-fi sound system). I tuned client.conf on
> notebook and default.pa <http://default.pa> on remote machine. Network
> streaming works nicely. Then, I tried to use alsa "multi" plugin to have
> simultaneous output:

snip...

> But this doesn't work - I have sound only on remote machine somewhy. I
> also tried "copy" plugin, unsuccessfully too.

Don't use alsa level stuff. The only alsa level config should be to push
audio to PA and then forget all alsa things!

> Maybe pulseaudio has it's own instruments to implement this? I read tons
> of howtos and documentation, but cannot realize what to do now. :(

PulseAudio has a combine plugin. Just load the combine sink and you'll
get a new virtual sink that outputs to both local and remove sinks.

You can read about this on our wiki:
http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/Modules#module-combine

There is even a ticky box in paprefs (but here it only uses local
devices, not network tunnels.

Of course you say above you've tuned client.conf. This should also not
be done. Machines should typically always talk to their own PA daemon on
the local machine, but it in turn should be configured to use a Tunnel
Sink. This will allow you to switch apps from local to remote with ease
via pavucontrol. Again, module tunnel can be configured as per the
details on the above link. It can even work automatically with
zeroconf/avahi.

Col




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Colin Guthrie
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http://colin.guthr.ie/

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