[pulseaudio-discuss] MacOS X Support

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Maarten Bosmans at 02/03/11 09:51 did gyre and gimble:
> 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.

IIRC Daniel Mack (who wrote most of the OSX support in recent years in
PA) was intending on writing (perhaps "intending" is too strong a word
tho'!) a virtual CoreAudio device that is "PulseAudio" that would work
in the same way that the ALSA->Pulse stuff work on Linux. I'm not sure
if he ever got around to that or not. IIRC he's still rather active on
the alsa-devel mailing list. It may be worth asking him? Actually I've
CC'ed him. Perhaps he can reply with more accurate comments.

>> 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.

While I don't know, I strongly suspect that VLC on mac is not compiled
with PA support....

Col




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Colin Guthrie
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