Why is pulseaudio crippled on the n900?
 

PulseAudio is used for the audio system/mixing/routing on the n900.

Compared to other solutions for mixing/routing, PA is quite CPU heavy. The n900 is a beast of a machine, so this isn't as much of an issue, but I have to wonder why for the life of me I cannot get PulseAudio's "killer app" working.

I'm speaking of course of network-transparency, the ability to route audio in PulseAudio over a TCP connection. I've spent many hours banging my head against the device trying to find a way to get pulseaudio-native-tcp working, but to no avail.

Is this intentional? Is there a reason why I shouldn't be able route audio to the n900 from other hosts on my LAN? The module appears to be included, and the config even appears to attempt to load it, but I can't even connect from 127.0.0.1


Getting TCP PulseAudio streams working would also provide a path to get sound working from inside of chroot's like qole's

Without network transparency, what good is PulseAudio? I would be happy to part with a few cpu cycles to gain this added flexibility, but in it's current state the use of PulseAudio on the n900 feels wasteful.

Has anyone made any headway on this?

Re: Why is pulseaudio crippled on the n900?
 

I don't have a device to try this out on, but I'd like to see this too. Pulseaudio's ability to route audio over the network hasn't felt all that useful on my desktop, but it would be perfect for a mobile phone. Hopefully we can find a way to do this.

Re: Why is pulseaudio crippled on the n900?
 

Did you file a bug report?

Re: Why is pulseaudio crippled on the n900?
 

That's dissapointing, this is one of the things I wanted to try with pulseaudio on the N900. :(

Hopefully a community fix or an official fix will come for this (and I have to choose a distribution that actually implemented pulseaudio correctly.. ie: not Ubuntu).

Re: Why is pulseaudio crippled on the n900?
 

The wiki on
http://wiki.maemo.org/Documentation/...ain#PulseAudio
advertises PA's network-transparency, so at least it doesn't seem to be a well-known restriction. Either it's intentional and wasn't yet communicated, or it's a bug (which you please must report, describing exactly what you did to get it working) - or it's just something you forgot when you tried.

I don't know much about PA other than the few buzzwords floating around. My main computer is a gentoo box and doesn't have PA installed (yet?). My laptop runs Ubuntu with PA, and I did notice how easy it was to switch audio output to a A2DP headset.

Now if this works with the N900... and works across devices in my network... what could I do?

Like, in theory, could I answer a call on my laptop when the phone rings in the other room? With a command line script I could run via SSH to make the phone part of the N900 answer the call and re-route everything sound related to my Ubuntu laptop. Would that be possible, given PA does really work without restrictions on the N900? Or am I getting too excited here? ;)

Re: Why is pulseaudio crippled on the n900?
 

Well you probably couldn't answer the N900 while on the laptop unless you had some SSH or VNC connection setup to the SSH to remote control it. But what PulseAudio's networking lets you do is pipe the audio to whereever you want.

E.g. if you wanted to play whatever sound that was coming from the N900 (music, podcast, and ideally a phone call) you could direct it over to your desktop's speakers or laptop's speakers). Not sure how it works with input sources but I believe it could be the same (if it is you could use say your headset or laptop's microphone instead of the N900's microphone).

Re: Why is pulseaudio crippled on the n900?
 

Of course I need a way to remote-control the N900 from my laptop the moment I hear it ring. This would be done via a script (on the N900) I call via SSH. (I an ideal world, it would be a fancy app on both sides with GUI and some options and settings :D )

Funny idea, actually. Not really useful, I'm afraid, but funny.

Re: Why is pulseaudio crippled on the n900?
 

Likewise you can think of it the other way around.

Imagine using the N900 as an additional speaker. You could put your PC speakers to your side and the N900 behind you. =P

Re: Why is pulseaudio crippled on the n900?
 

I had to install the package pulseaudio-module-extra in order to have pulseaudio-native-tcp actually loaded.
Alas, I still can't connect from/to other machines as the connection is always terminated prematurely.

Local connections to the N900 itself over tcp DO work however (tested with paplay and pactl). Maybe some part is implemented in a non-standard way.

Needs some more looking into.

Re: Why is pulseaudio crippled on the n900?
 

Wouldn't reusing the same client libraries as shipped with the N900 and binding whatever directories those use work?