[pulseaudio-discuss] MacOS X Support

[Daniel Mack]

On Mar 2, 2011 8:16 AM, "Colin Guthrie" <gmane at colin.guthr.ie> wrote:
>
> '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.

Jep, I have plans to continue my work on the OS X port, and finish the
virtual audio driver I was working on. Currently, this is all just prove of
concept, but I'm confident that it will be really useful once it's finished.

At the moment, I am travelling, but once I'm back in some weeks, I will
hopefully find some time to catch up with this project. I'll post updates on
this list, of course.

> >> 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....

No, that would't make sense either. What we need is  generic way to get
audio from all CoreAudio applications, without modifing them. I'm working on
this, stay tuned :-)

Daniel
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