[pulseaudio-discuss] is there simple remote control?

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Sat, 2015-12-12 at 20:42 +0000, hamann.w at t-online.de wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> imagine this situation: box A is sort of an entertainment station, and it is using PA for sound.
> Now box B is an asterisk telephony server.  Now, when the phone rings, it would be great
> to reduce the valume of sound or mute it, and restore when the phone is hung up.
> Is there anything ready to use?
> When googling for this subject, I saw sort of a complete gui remote control (reverb).
> However, the telephony box will likely have neither graphics nor sound software installed

If I understood correctly, you want to control the volume of box A from
box B. You can do that by enabling network access on box A, configuring
PulseAudio clients on box B to connect to box A and using pactl on box
B to set the volume.

How to enable network access on box A:

Load module-native-protocol-tcp. If you're running pulseaudio in the
system mode, load it in /etc/pulse/system.pa. If you're running
pulseaudio in the user mode, copy /etc/pulse/default.pa to
~/.config/pulse/default.pa of the appropriate user and put the load
command there (don't edit /etc/pulse/default.pa directly, because you
don't want all users to try to accept network connections on the same
TCP port).

See https://wiki.freedesktop.org/www/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/
User/Modules/ for information about various options that module-native-
protocol-tcp accepts. For example, you may want to configure how
authorization is done (or not done).

How to configure PulseAudio clients on box B:

Add "default-server = boxA" to ~/.config/pulse/client.conf of the
appropriate user (or /etc/pulse/client.conf, if you want all users to
share the same configuration). "boxA" can be either an IP address or a
DNS name.

If you enable cookie-based authorization (which is the default), you
will have to copy the cookie from box A to ~/.config/pulse/cookie on
box B for all users on box B that should be able to have access on box
A. The cookie location on box A is ~/.config/pulse/cookie if pulseaudio
runs in the user mode, and /var/lib/pulse/cookie if pulseaudio runs in
the system mode.

How to use pactl:

See "man pactl".

-- 
Tanu