I built exactly what you are asking for about a year ago and have been using it A LOT ever since. I currently have 6 zones (5 sets of speakers + icecast output) and 4 mpd instances. I also have a very rudimentary interface to allow any mpd instance to play its sound out of any zone (or multiple zones, synced). I warn you the code is hacky, but perhaps with someone interested in the problem it could be cleaned up and turned into a proper open source project. It is also based on 0.9.10 and because it works so well (like it has NEVER crashed) I haven't ever upgraded anything except MPD to get replaygain support. Email me directly if you are interested. Matt Timothy J Massey wrote: > Hello! > > I am trying to build your typical multi-room audio server. I would like > to have a single computer with e.g. 4 copies of MPD as 4 sources, and e.g. > 8 USB soundcards, creating 8 sinks. I would like users to be able to > select, independently, for each of the sinks the source that it is > using--without disturbing any of the other sinks. A single source could > be played back by any number of sinks independently of each other, and > each source would be able to select from any of the available sources, > regardless of who else is using it as well. > > >From what I can tell, with PA you can pick only which (single) sink a > source is connected to. If you pick a new sink for the source, it is > removed from whatever sink it was using before. And AFAICT, if you want > to have a source play via more than one sink, the only way to do this is > to create a virtual sink that is a combination of more than one sink. Is > this correct? It's not really practical to create a virtual sink for each > of the possible combinations of e.g. 8 different sinks... > > I'm looking for a more flexible structure. I would like to be able to > connect a sink to a source, and leave whatever other sinks that might > already be playing from that source *alone*. For example, if I'm > listening to MPD#1 in the living room, and I start moving between the > living room and the kitchen, I want to be able to select MPD#1 in the > kitchen *and* leave it undisturbed in the living room. Then, if someone > moves into the living room and switches it to MPD#2, I want my playback in > the kitchen undisturbed. > > What I'm describing is a very typical bus setup that any higher-end > multi-zone audio (or mixing board) would support. Each output can > independently connect to one of a number of available sources without > affecting any of the other output channels. The sources don't care which > channels (if any) are connecting to them, and the sinks don't care what > the other channels are doing. > > I apologize in advance if this is a FAQ: I'm very willing to RTFM--just > please tell me which FM to R! :) I am open to any suggestions how I > might be able to accomplish this, including both different Linux > distributions and different sound management layers (i.e. would Jack be > better for this?). > > Thank you, > > Tim Massey > > _______________________________________________ > pulseaudio-discuss mailing list > pulseaudio-discuss at mail.0pointer.de > https://tango.0pointer.de/mailman/listinfo/pulseaudio-discuss >
