[pulseaudio-discuss] pulseaudio newbie questions

[Alexander E. Patrakov]

21.06.2015 14:19, Rick Mud wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have some newbie question about Pulseaudio. Firstly, let me explain
> what I've got working for now. I am now able to stream music from one
> Raspberry Pi to another Raspberry Pi. The receiving end is fitted with
> high quality DAC, and connected to an amplifier.
>
> My first question:
> 1) is the receiving end, in Pulseaudio terms, a client, or a server?

When audio playback is discussed, the receiving end is a server.

>
> I want a multi-room solution, streaming the same music from one sender
> to multiple Pi's, all connected to an amplifier. My second question:
>
> 2) Is it possible to distribute music from one sender to multiple
> receivers at the same time?

In theory, yes.

On the sender, install PulseAudio and load several instances of 
module-tunnel-sink (or module-tunnel-sink-new), and one 
module-combine-sink. Please use "pacmd describe-module" and "pactl list 
short sinks" to figure out the correct module arguments.

The caveat is that I recently got a private email from ValdikSS that 
tunnels don't really work with mpv (playback stops after a few minutes), 
even with pcaps attached. I have not debugged this.

-- 
Alexander E. Patrakov