Pulseaudio from Gentoo to Windows

ikshaar · Posted: Mon May 19, 2008 7:42 pm Post subject: Pulseaudio from Gentoo to Windows

I have now two computers at home, a Gentoo PC and a Windows one. The speaker set is on the Windows machine (for 3D sound in game).

Now I would like to send the sound from the gentoo machine to the Windows PC, and I found out that PulseAudio (http://pulseaudio.org/) seems like the best fit. However documentation is sparse to say the least. The "server", "sink" denomination is unclear to me.

I followed the wiki to install PulseAudio on gentoo but there is not much information on how to make two PC works together. Especially on the windows part of course. Plus the command line info does seem to work under windows as expected.

I just wonder if anyone has a similar working set-up ? windows is running the "server" right ? and gentoo the "client" ?

So far I failed to :
- start the windows pulseaudio.exe as a daemon server under windows (it crashes).
- understand the difference between the server and the sink

Any clue, link , advice is welcome.
_________________
"May God stands between you and harm in all the empty places where you must walk" - Babylon 5

ikshaar · Posted: Mon May 19, 2008 10:32 pm Post subject:

Ok got it.. sort of.

[Windows PC]
Windows installation file do not contain any configuration.
For a simple set-up as mine (all Gentoo sounds sent to Windows PC), make a default.pa file in the pulseaudio folder under windows with :

handyman5 · Posted: Thu Sep 11, 2008 11:13 pm Post subject:

I don't know anything about PulseAudio, but the server/source and sink terminology is a common engineering term.

Essentially, the source is a one-way flow of something (in this case, data) that must be dealt with in some way. A sink is the thing you use to deal with that flow. For example, you could have a source generating and pushing out streaming audio data over a network, and a sink that takes that data and plays it through speakers connected to a different computer. The neat thing is that the source is not exclusive to the sink; in order words, you could have multiple sources (different computers generating sound), and multiple sinks (different computers playing sound to speakers), and change them dynamically without rebuilding the whole works.

You can also have sinks that do different things, such as taking that stream of audio data and maybe saving it to the hard drive for later playback, or analyzing it to match patterns in the sound, or rebroadcasting it over the Internet, or converting it into a different format, etc. etc. The source doesn't know, and doesn't care, as long as the sink can understand the data that the source generates.

Hope this helps a little!