Pulseaudio - whyyyyyy?

[Martux]

EDIT: Changing thread title to reflect my issues here.

Hello!
Lately I discovered some items in my KDE network setting that are related to audio. After fiddling with network settings a bit, I saw even something related to Clementine (my favorite music player). Ever since, I wonder how or if it is possible to send music from my laptop to the PC that is hooked up to the PA? Pulseaudio seems to be capable of doing this, but I am seriously lost on how?
I followed the Wiki article regarding pulseaudio and have lots of weird audio devices now in the KDE audio setting (RTP, whatnot), but can't get sound out of any of them for the sake of it
Can anyone point me to the right direction? How's this supposed to work? Especially the RTP related stuff, I don't get it really. Thanks.
_________________
"Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous."
Albert Einstein
"The road to success is always under construction"

[Roman_Gruber]

I never have done this.

But lets assume you provide some streaming services

and on the receving end use smoething like

cvlc and the url to the streaming device

Serve streams audio which you have to set up, cvlc or vlc can decode it and plays it.

"just set up" an internet radio ...

usually those radio stations have m3u or wma ending, i think m3u is the way to go

[cboldt]

I use mpd to stream music, and have it output a vorbis encoded stream to port 8000.

From /etc/mpd.conf on the host/server machine (named "involute" on the local network) ...

[Ant P.]

[Martux]

Thanks Ant P. for the suggestions.
I found a very good guide at the Arch Wiki.
Nevertheless, I cannot get sound out of it.
These are the packages:

[kazdva]

[Martux]

Yep, that's a nice remote control app
_________________
"Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous."
Albert Einstein
"The road to success is always under construction"

[Ant P.]

[Martux]

I will have time to systematically investigate this further on the weekend only. Hope I can make it work. Actually, Pulseaudios capabilities read awesome!
_________________
"Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous."
Albert Einstein
"The road to success is always under construction"

[Martux]

Wew, this is so messed up! I managed to get sound out of it generally... BUT the lag/stuttering is horrible over WIFI.
Jesus, I consider this completely non-functional for now. Too bad, but I really tried everything I could imagine.
_________________
"Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous."
Albert Einstein
"The road to success is always under construction"

[Ant P.]

Huh, the only time I've had a problem with stuttering was when I tried streaming from phone -> bluetooth -> laptop -> wifi -> desktop. It does send uncompressed audio though, maybe you have a bandwidth problem...

[Martux]

Wow, that's not funny. I am streaming directly from one i7 to another over a 5Ghz WIFI which. easily transfers like 15 to 20 MB/s over NFS. Both computers have perfectly working Intel WIFI NICs (7260 and 8260) and there's no load on the network when I am trying pulseaudio. I have all relevant protocols/software installed. Basically it should "just work". Maybe I am going to try to get rid of all pulseaudio stuff and start all over again.
_________________
"Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous."
Albert Einstein
"The road to success is always under construction"

[ct85711]

The part of just works is more of an assumption that pulseaudio works as we'd think it would (which I've find is actually not what the devs think). Then you get into the issue that pulseaudio's documentation is really crappy in general. A proper test on streaming the audio to another host, would be trying through a regular wired connection, trying to assume streaming anything over WIFI is not a good thing to do, as WIFI is a slow medium where as a wired connection is much faster.

[Martux]

You're probably right. What confuses me as well is this: there seems to be no transparent way to set any buffering latency whatsoever. MY problem is, one machine is an ultrabook and can't even be connected to a wired connection. Maybe I will hook up the other one just to see if it improves anything.
_________________
"Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous."
Albert Einstein
"The road to success is always under construction"

[Cyker]

Ugh, I remember trying to get this to work with VNC to transport sound to the remote terminal; Gave up after I started seriously considering stabbing myself in the eyes after so much reading to try and figure out why it wasn't working!

I can only wish you better luck than I had!

[Martux]

To conclude my horrorful journey, here's what I tried:
Realizing that the stuttering might come from quite long ping times in my LAN (~500 -1000 ms at times), I optimized my WIFI and adjusted the channel. THat made things better, but even from 200 ms onwards, stuttering occured.
nother thing that drove me completely mad was this:
Setup consists of loading module-tcp-native on both machines and zeroconf-publish on the server, zeroconf-discover on the client respectively. And copying the cookie. So far, so simple. Only that nothing could make zeroconf-discover on the client load. Like nothing.
Anyways... It is a good idea, but the concept seems fundamentally flawed or even broken for now. I can't spare more time on this. Thanks to everyone who helped with this.
_________________
"Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous."
Albert Einstein
"The road to success is always under construction"

[Ant P.]

Copying cookies shouldn't be necessary, neither should manually loading nodule-native-protocol-tcp... the zeroconf module does that for you (that's why it's called zeroconf!). Are you sure there's nothing in the logs saying why it wouldn't load?

[Martux]

You mean the system's log?
_________________
"Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous."
Albert Einstein
"The road to success is always under construction"

[Martux]

Deleted last post because error message was caused by a typo.
I got zeroconf-discover/publish now loaded correctly on the server/client. Trying to make it as basic as possible, this is without anything else set in /etc/pulse/default.pa. I can see the card from the server now in Audio settings of KDE (on the client). Something like alsa_output_pci analog stereo (192.168.x.x:4713). But they are greyed out... Pulse Audio Volume Control doesn't mention them at all, nor does pacmd list-sinks or pacmd list-cards. Avahi is of course loaded on both machines.
_________________
"Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous."
Albert Einstein
"The road to success is always under construction"

[Ant P.]

I think that might be a result of KDE "remembering" the last time it saw the card... pacmd is pretty much authoritative here.