PulseAudio modules

Overview

Roc provides a set of PulseAudio modules allowing PulseAudio to use Roc as a transport and improve its service quality over an unreliable network such as Wi-Fi.

Warning

Work in progress! The implementation is in the proof-of-concept stage. Not all features are implemented, and implemented features are not fully tested yet. Most notably, there is no service discovery, so that the user have to register a pair of sink and sink-input manually. It’s planned to be implemented in upcoming releases.

Advantages over Roc command-line tools:

• Seamless integration into the PulseAudio workflow. The user can connect a local audio stream to a remote audio device using common PulseAudio tools like pavucontrol.
• A bit lower latency. Since Roc is integrated into the PulseAudio server, there is no additional communication step between Roc and PulseAudio server.

Advantages over PulseAudio “native” protocol:

• Better service quaility when the latency is low and the network is unreliable. PulseAudio “native” protocol uses TCP, while Roc uses RTP, which is better suited for real-time communication than TCP-based protocols.
• Compatibility with standard protocols. PulseAudio “native” protocol is PulseAudio-specific, while Roc implements a set of standardized RTP-based protocols.

Advantages over PulseAudio built-in RTP support:

• Better service quaility when the latency is low and the network is unreliable. PulseAudio uses bare RTP, while Roc also employs Forward Erasure Correction extensions.

Building

You need to build PulseAudio itself from sources (either automatically or manually) and enable building Roc PulseAudio modules using --enable-pulseaudio-modules SCons option.

Warning

You should build exactly the same PulseAudio version as you’re running since PulseAudio does not provide an ABI and API compatibility for internal modules.

To download and build PulseAudio automatically, use --build-3rdparty SCons option:

$ scons --enable-pulseaudio-modules --build-3rdparty=pulseaudio ...       # auto-detect PulseAudio version
$ scons --enable-pulseaudio-modules --build-3rdparty=pulseaudio:10.0 ...  # use specified PulseAudio version

Alternatively, you can build PulseAudio manually and use --with-pulseaudio option to specify a directory where PulseAudio sources are located:

$ scons --enable-pulseaudio-modules --with-pulseaudio=/path/to/pulseaudio ...

See our Building page for details. In particular, the User cookbook page provides examples for popular distros.

Installing

You need to install Roc library and PulseAudio modules into the system.

You can do it by adding “sudo” and “install” to your SCons command:

$ sudo scons --enable-pulseaudio-modules --build-3rdparty=pulseaudio:10.0 ... install

Alternatively, you can copy or symlink the files manually, e.g.:

$ cp ./bin/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/module-roc-sink.so /usr/lib/pulse-10.0/modules/
$ cp ./bin/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/module-roc-sink-input.so /usr/lib/pulse-10.0/modules/
$ cp ./bin/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/libroc.so /usr/lib/

Running receiver

For the receiving side, Roc provides module-roc-sink-input PulseAudio module. It creates a PulseAudio sink input that receives samples from Roc sender and passes them to the sink it is connected to. You can then connect it to any audio device.

Roc sink input supports several options:

option	required	default	description
sink	no	<default sink>	the name of the sink to connect the new sink input to
sink_input_properties	no	empty	additional sink input properties
resampler_profile	no	medium	resampler mode, supported values: disable, high, medium, low
sess_latency_msec	no	200	target session latency in milliseconds
io_latency_msec	no	40	target playback latency in milliseconds
local_ip	no	0.0.0.0	local address to bind to
local_source_port	no	10001	local port for source (audio) packets
local_repair_port	no	10002	local port for repair (FEC) packets

Here is how you can create a Roc sink input from command line:

$ pactl load-module module-roc-sink-input

Alternatively, you can add this line to /etc/pulse/default.pa to create a Roc sink input automatically at PulseAudio start:

load-module module-roc-sink-input

You can then connect the Roc sink input to an audio device (i.e. a sink) via command line:

# determine Roc sink-input number
$ pactl list sink-inputs

# connect Roc sink-input to a sink
$ pactl move-sink-input <roc_sink_input_number> <sink>

Or via the pavucontrol graphical tool:

Running sender

For the sending side, Roc provides module-roc-sink PulseAudio module. It creates a PulseAudio sink that sends samples written to it to a preconfigured receiver address. You can then connect an audio stream of any running application to that sink, or make it the default sink.

Roc sink supports several options:

option	required	default	description
sink_name	no	roc_sender	the name of the new sink
sink_properties	no	empty	additional sink properties
local_ip	no	0.0.0.0	local sender address to bind to
remote_ip	yes	no	remote receiver address
remote_source_port	no	10001	remote receiver port for source (audio) packets
remote_repair_port	no	10002	remote receiver port for repair (FEC) packets

Here is how you can create a Roc sink from command line:

$ pactl load-module module-roc-sink remote_ip=<receiver_ip>

Alternatively, you can add this line to /etc/pulse/default.pa to create a Roc sink automatically at PulseAudio start:

load-module module-roc-sink remote_ip=<receiver_ip>

You can then connect an audio stream (i.e. a sink input) to the Roc sink via command line:

$ pactl move-sink-input <sink_input_number> roc_sender

Or via the pavucontrol graphical tool:

Naming

PulseAudio sinks and sink inputs have name and description. Name is usually used when the sink or sink input is referenced from command-line tools or configuration files, and description is shown in the GUI.

Sink name and description can be configured via sink_name module argument and device.description sink property set by sink_properties module argument:

$ pactl load-module module-roc-sink remote_ip=192.168.1.38 \
    sink_name=my_name sink_properties=device.description=My-Description

Sink input name and description can be configured via sink_input_name module argument and media.name sink input property set by sink_input_properties module argument:

$ pactl load-module module-roc-sink-input \
    sink_input_name=my_name sink_input_properties=media.name=My-Description

Interoperability

Roc PulseAudio modules are interoperable with Roc library command line tools, i.e.:

• as a sender, you can use either roc_sender from the C library, roc-send command line tool, or module-roc-sink
• as a receiver, you can use either roc_receiver from the C library, roc-recv command line tool, or module-roc-sink-input

Troubleshooting

First, run PulseAudio server in verbose mode, both on sending and receiving sides:

$ pulseaudio -vvv

Among other things, you should find some messages from Roc sink and sink-input there, which may give some idea about what’s going wrong.

Second, you can try to replace sender, receiver, or both with Roc command line tools to determine whether the issue is specific to PulseAudio modules or not.