[pulseaudio-discuss] MacOS X Support

[Maarten Bosmans]

2011/2/27 Stephen Lee <sl33nyc at gmail.com>:
> I git clone'd master yesterday, successfully compiled, and ran PA on my MacOS X machine.  I was pleasantly surprised to see the Coreaudio modules!  I successfully tunnelled audio from one of my Linux machines to my MacOS X w/o using esound, but I noticed that iTunes wasn't included as a client when I was playing it and then checking list-clients from the PA cli.

That is of course expected, as iTunes and other mac apps are not pulse
clients. So you have several applications playing audio connected to
the CoreAudio subsystem and PulseAudio is one of them. This is the
same situation as on Linux, where pulse connects to ALSA and
applications that don't use libpulse but connect directly to ALSA
cannot be manipulated by pulse. There is however a way to make
PulseAudio your default ALSA device, so that even apps that only use
libasound are connected to pulse, all be it in a bit of a roundabout
way.

> Generally, what's the plan for being able to manipulate native MacOS X clients/streams via PA?  It'd be great to replace the AirTunes (AirPlay) functionality that Apple offers.  If this functionality is still a work in progress, is there a workaround?

The workaround would be to use an audio player that output to
PulseAudio, like vlc, rhythmbox, banshee, amarok, though I don't have
a clue whether these are ported to OSX and are able to use libpulse
there.

> -Stephen