[pulseaudio-discuss] pulseaudio newbie questions

[Georg Chini]

On 23.06.2015 15:32, Alexander E. Patrakov wrote:
> 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.
>
Hi,

I wonder why everyone seems to try to do this with tunnel-sink and 
combine-sink.
(There were some previous posts concerning a similar topic not very long 
ago.)
Why not use tunnel-source instead? I tested the following setup:

On the server (my local network is 192.168.255.0/24):

load-module module-native-protocol-tcp 
auth-ip-acl='127.0.0.1;192.168.255.0/24'
load-module module-null-sink sink_name=my_sink channels=2 rate=44100

Then I played the stream back to my_sink.

On the client:

load-module module-tunnel-source server=my_server 
source_name=remote_source source=my_sink.monitor
load-module module-loopback source=remote_source

I can stream to an arbitrary number of clients (tested only with two 
clients) without any
reconnection or playback problems this way. It also makes the setup on 
the server very
simple.

Regards
              Georg