[pulseaudio-discuss] running pulseaudio on an embedded device with no X as a network sink

[Doron Behar]

Well, thanks for your answer Georg, It was really nice of you to respond
because I really felt miserable here and you truly helped me.

First of all, in order to make sure `pulseaudio` is really functional
without X and in system mode, using `paplay` did it.

My problem was that I didn't really expected sound to come from the HDMI
output, while I was connected to a monitor with the HDMI, I saw only one
output sink with the name as when I had no HDMI connected and only the
sink available was the 3.5 jack. It's not only that it had the same
name, the name `alsa_output.platform-soc_audio.analog-mono` so I was
sure the name referred to the analog 3.5 jack output. It seems as if
there's some kind of hardware limitation for the Raspberry-Pi that
doesn't enable multiple output sinks to be available for programs above
the kernel like ALSA and pulseaudio at once.

Oh and just for the record - for anyone who will read this in the
future: This can be done using a bare tty, an attached tmux session
(invoked from a tty) and from an ssh session, it doesn't matter.

Oh and I did had to review again this document:
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/Network/
Because I forgot to load `module-esound-protocol-tcp`.

Thanks again Georg.

On Wed, Jan 03, 2018 at 10:30:07AM +0100, Georg Chini wrote:
> On 03.01.2018 00:44, Doron Behar wrote:
> > Bump
> > 
> > On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 11:34:29AM +0200, Doron Behar wrote:
> > > Hello everyone,
> > > 
> > > I'm trying for a while now to run pulseaudio on my Raspberry-Pi 3 and
> > > I can't get it to work. I posted a question with a lot of details on
> > > stackexchange.com:
> > > 
> > > https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/q/76871/78180
> 
> What you describe there is not about using PA as a network sink.
> Did you read
> https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/SystemWide/
> Have you created the necessary user and groups and added
> the local user to the pulse-access group?
> 
> Also, you should start PA really as root. The sudo command
> you give further down will pass the user environment to the
> daemon. So "su - root" (not simply "su root") and then start
> PA instead of using sudo.
> To test your setup, please use paplay instead of aplay. aplay
> is an alsa tool.
> 
> > > 
> > > As I said there, I have installed `omxplayer`. It works, proving my
> > > hardware is totally OK.
> > > 
> > > I want to eventually plug my Raspberry-Pi into electricity and to be able
> > > to add a network sink from a different computer with a command like this
> > > running on the local machine:
> > > 
> > > ```
> > > pacmd load-module module-tunnel-sink server=archpi
> > > ```
> > > 
> > > I'm pretty sure that eventually the way to do this involves having an
> > > enabled systemd service that will run `pulseaudio --daemonize=false
> > > --system=true`.
> > > 
> > > Here is what I've tried so far:
> > > 
> > > I've tried to test this with `sudo pulseaudio --system=true -vv
> > > --daemonize=false` on a user session.
> 
> See above.
> 
> > > 
> > > I also made sure the file `/etc/pulse/system.pa` on the remote machine has
> > > the following lines:
> > > 
> > > ```pa
> > > load-module module-native-protocol-tcp auth-ip-acl=127.0.0.1;192.168.14.0/24 auth-anonymous=true
> > > load-module module-zeroconf-publish
> > > load-module module-zeroconf-discover
> > > ```
> 
> You do not need module-zeroconf-discover on the remote side, only on the
> client side.
> Did you check that 192.168.14.0/24 is the correct network for you?
> Do you have the avahi daemon running on client and server? Do you need it at
> all?
> From what you are writing above, I guess that auto discovery is not
> necessary in your
> setup. Then you don't need avahi (at least not for PA) and the zeroconf
> modules.
> On the client machine, you should only need to do something like:
> 
> pacmd load-module module-tunnel-sink server=192.168.x.y
> sink_name=remote_sink sink="the name of the sink on the remote machine"
> 
> Replace server= and sink= with the appropriate values for your setup.
> 
> Then you should see a sink "remote_sink" on your client.
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