Multi room functionality Via Pulseaudio RTP

[jamesmvp]

Hello, I'm new to the forum and just this week installed Subsonic at home on my server alongside a MythTV setup, I have to say I think it's a great peice of sofware, well wirtten and very easy to use, I love it.

One thing I've wanted to do for a while is be able to have one interface to control multi-room set-ups, and Subsonic gets me close to that.

This is my setup at the moment:

I have 6 various machines all with ubuntu installed and in various rooms in the house, they all have the pulseaudio server/client packages installed so the machines can access and send audio to any or all of the machines in the house over the network.

The Subsonic Jukebox has been set to send the audio as an Multicast RTP stream which all the machines receive and will output when they are switched on which is great if I'm on my laptop or Android phone I can listen to music at the drop of a hat without too much messing and it's accessible wherever I am in the house or even at the office.

However, I would like to suggest expanding this option into a multi-room configuration by being able to have multiple Jukeboxes each assignable to a specific sound device that pulse audio picks up and displays in the sound options. that way I could play music in the lounge and my son can play a different selection in his room.

So I could assign 'jukebox A' to output to the lounge machine only via pulse audio, and 'Jukebox B' to the bedroom, but being able to allow users to be able to move between jukeboxes or 'zones' so the music can follow them would be a benefit...

I suppose in the first instance having a more configurable audio interface within the player section would be useful... it would need to remember what output it uses as the output comes and goes when that machine (for example in the lounge) is switched on and off and will disappear and reappear at will.

Is that doable? I'm not sure it one machine can stream to multiple machines simultaneously through pulseaudio, anyone know?

Forgive me if this has been spoken about previously, I did have a look but couldn't see any mention of it anywhere.

Would be interested on your thoughts.

JP.

[murray42]

I'd like to second the request. My current setup has subsonic jukebox playing via on-board sound to an FM transmitter (12v automotive iPod/mp3 player mount). This is convenient to have lullabies playing 24/7 synchronized between my children's bedrooms. My goal is to play another jukebox/stream through either the surround channels of the on-board sound or via an add-on sound-card. I think my only avenue is to run a second subsonic instance on a different port and pass a different output argument.

This could create a fun multi-room setup with multiple streams being broadcast on multiple FM frequencies.

[agentblueuk]

+1 for this request too

Could you post some details as to how you setup your current configuration?

[unimatrix27]

+1 for this request (which is really old but still would be the best feature that I am missing)

I have a similar setup as the OP - right now I am using different RTP streams on different Multicast Ports to support multiple streams being listened to by different rooms. The room then "tunes" to the RTP channel (port) that the user wants to listen to in that room.

Right now I am running several MPD instances on the different ports and I am syncing my playlists from Subsonic to MPD via a perl script - but it would be nice to have this all in subsonic. Otherwise a user must create a playlist first in subsonic and then go to MPD etc. this is not nice.

Thanks!

[beerhoof]

can either the OP or unimatrix27 elaborate on how they set this multiple room thing up?

I currently use an raspberry pi w/ arch for my SS server that's set up at my stereo. I'd like to set up my arch cubox with SS at the router with the HDDs and send the audio from jukebox to the Pi at the stereo and possibly other pis in the place.

I can offer like 5 bucks via paypal or something for a nice tut.

EDIT: these may help:

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Softwar ... twork/RTP/

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Softwar ... /#index4h3

they however read like a foreign language at this point.

[beerhoof]

How were either of you able to get RTP working without flooding your wireless network?