pulseaudio madness

pulseaudio madness

[Gary Thomas]

I have a multi-media application/system (built with Poky/Yocto of course)
that is currently using ALSA for the sound.  This works great but now
I'd like to be able to share some of the sound resources, in particular
the audio output (speakers).  To satisfy this, I looked at pulseaudio,
but I'm overwhelmed by the package choices (there are 120 packages),
not to mention what to do about configuration.

I don't see any examples (images, etc) that use pulseaudio.

Does anyone have any recommendations on what I might need to install,
how to configure it, etc, to take over from my simple ALSA setup?

Thanks

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
Gary Thomas                 |  Consulting for the
MLB Associates              |    Embedded world
------------------------------------------------------------

Re: pulseaudio madness

[Burton, Ross]

Hi Gary,

On 5 February 2013 12:44, Gary Thomas <gary@mlbassoc.com> wrote:
> I have a multi-media application/system (built with Poky/Yocto of course)
> that is currently using ALSA for the sound.  This works great but now
> I'd like to be able to share some of the sound resources, in particular
> the audio output (speakers).  To satisfy this, I looked at pulseaudio,
> but I'm overwhelmed by the package choices (there are 120 packages),
> not to mention what to do about configuration.
>
> I don't see any examples (images, etc) that use pulseaudio.
>
> Does anyone have any recommendations on what I might need to install,
> how to configure it, etc, to take over from my simple ALSA setup?

The top tip is the PulseAudio documentation on the web site, that
lists all the plugins and what they do.  The pulseaudio-server package
depends on all of the important plugins, so that gives you a working
PA setup once you've started it.

You might want to have a look at Guacamayo's use of PA, that uses it
and will automatically switch output when new speakers are plugged in
too.    https://github.com/Guacamayo

Ross

Re: pulseaudio madness

[Gary Thomas]

On 2013-02-05 06:52, Burton, Ross wrote:
> Hi Gary,
>
> On 5 February 2013 12:44, Gary Thomas <gary@mlbassoc.com> wrote:
>> I have a multi-media application/system (built with Poky/Yocto of course)
>> that is currently using ALSA for the sound.  This works great but now
>> I'd like to be able to share some of the sound resources, in particular
>> the audio output (speakers).  To satisfy this, I looked at pulseaudio,
>> but I'm overwhelmed by the package choices (there are 120 packages),
>> not to mention what to do about configuration.
>>
>> I don't see any examples (images, etc) that use pulseaudio.
>>
>> Does anyone have any recommendations on what I might need to install,
>> how to configure it, etc, to take over from my simple ALSA setup?
>
> The top tip is the PulseAudio documentation on the web site, that
> lists all the plugins and what they do.  The pulseaudio-server package
> depends on all of the important plugins, so that gives you a working
> PA setup once you've started it.
>
> You might want to have a look at Guacamayo's use of PA, that uses it
> and will automatically switch output when new speakers are plugged in
> too.    https://github.com/Guacamayo

Thanks, that helped.  I've built Guacamayo for my RaspberryPi and
can see how it's set up.

One thing I'm missing is how the pulseaudio server gets started?

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
Gary Thomas                 |  Consulting for the
MLB Associates              |    Embedded world
------------------------------------------------------------

Re: pulseaudio madness

[Tomas Frydrych]

On 06/02/13 13:50, Gary Thomas wrote:
> On 2013-02-05 06:52, Burton, Ross wrote:
>> Hi Gary,
>>
>> On 5 February 2013 12:44, Gary Thomas <gary@mlbassoc.com> wrote:
>>> I have a multi-media application/system (built with Poky/Yocto of
>>> course)
>>> that is currently using ALSA for the sound.  This works great but now
>>> I'd like to be able to share some of the sound resources, in particular
>>> the audio output (speakers).  To satisfy this, I looked at pulseaudio,
>>> but I'm overwhelmed by the package choices (there are 120 packages),
>>> not to mention what to do about configuration.
>>>
>>> I don't see any examples (images, etc) that use pulseaudio.
>>>
>>> Does anyone have any recommendations on what I might need to install,
>>> how to configure it, etc, to take over from my simple ALSA setup?
>>
>> The top tip is the PulseAudio documentation on the web site, that
>> lists all the plugins and what they do.  The pulseaudio-server package
>> depends on all of the important plugins, so that gives you a working
>> PA setup once you've started it.
>>
>> You might want to have a look at Guacamayo's use of PA, that uses it
>> and will automatically switch output when new speakers are plugged in
>> too.    https://github.com/Guacamayo
> 
> Thanks, that helped.  I've built Guacamayo for my RaspberryPi and
> can see how it's set up.
> 
> One thing I'm missing is how the pulseaudio server gets started?

Depends on the image type, either from /eta/xdg/autostart, or for the
audiplayer image from the /etc/init.d/guacamayo-session-* script.

Tomas

Re: pulseaudio madness

[Gary Thomas]

On 2013-02-06 06:50, Gary Thomas wrote:
> On 2013-02-05 06:52, Burton, Ross wrote:
>> Hi Gary,
>>
>> On 5 February 2013 12:44, Gary Thomas <gary@mlbassoc.com> wrote:
>>> I have a multi-media application/system (built with Poky/Yocto of course)
>>> that is currently using ALSA for the sound.  This works great but now
>>> I'd like to be able to share some of the sound resources, in particular
>>> the audio output (speakers).  To satisfy this, I looked at pulseaudio,
>>> but I'm overwhelmed by the package choices (there are 120 packages),
>>> not to mention what to do about configuration.
>>>
>>> I don't see any examples (images, etc) that use pulseaudio.
>>>
>>> Does anyone have any recommendations on what I might need to install,
>>> how to configure it, etc, to take over from my simple ALSA setup?
>>
>> The top tip is the PulseAudio documentation on the web site, that
>> lists all the plugins and what they do.  The pulseaudio-server package
>> depends on all of the important plugins, so that gives you a working
>> PA setup once you've started it.
>>
>> You might want to have a look at Guacamayo's use of PA, that uses it
>> and will automatically switch output when new speakers are plugged in
>> too.    https://github.com/Guacamayo
>
> Thanks, that helped.  I've built Guacamayo for my RaspberryPi and
> can see how it's set up.

That said, I've not had much luck actually getting anything out of the
audio :-(  I tried the guacamayo-image-mex-raspberrypi.rpi-sdimg which
came up and gave me a nice display but it wasn't obvious how to import
media and/or make it play.  I tried copying some files manually to the
SD card, but they wouldn't play either.

Then I tried guacamayo-image-audioplayer-raspberrypi.rpi-sdimg and it
was even less intuitive.

Can you give me some guidance?  All I'd like to do is play a simple
(.wav) file on y RaspberryPi using pulseaudio.

Thanks

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
Gary Thomas                 |  Consulting for the
MLB Associates              |    Embedded world
------------------------------------------------------------

Re: pulseaudio madness

[Tomas Frydrych]

On 06/02/13 22:43, Gary Thomas wrote:
>>> You might want to have a look at Guacamayo's use of PA, that uses it
>>> and will automatically switch output when new speakers are plugged in
>>> too.    https://github.com/Guacamayo
>>
>> Thanks, that helped.  I've built Guacamayo for my RaspberryPi and
>> can see how it's set up.
> 
> That said, I've not had much luck actually getting anything out of the
> audio :-(  I tried the guacamayo-image-mex-raspberrypi.rpi-sdimg which
> came up and gave me a nice display but it wasn't obvious how to import
> media and/or make it play.  I tried copying some files manually to the
> SD card, but they wouldn't play either.

Both the guacamayo mex and audioplayer images are for UPnP appliances,
i.e., they generally expect to find content on the network, provided by
UPnP media servers (i.e., a NAS).

The mex image is not really much use on the RPi, the HW is too
underpowered to run a non-trivial GL application. But you can put the
audio files into the xuser's Music directory (or with the demo files
into /usr/share/demos/audio) and they should appear in the Music column
of MEX.


> Then I tried guacamayo-image-audioplayer-raspberrypi.rpi-sdimg and it
> was even less intuitive.

You need a UPnP media controller to interact with the audioplayer.
BubbleUPnP for Android works very well.


> Can you give me some guidance?  All I'd like to do is play a simple
> (.wav) file on y RaspberryPi using pulseaudio.

gst-launch playbin2 uri=file:///... should do that for you.


Tomas

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