Pulseaudio network streaming

I’ve tried setting up pulseaudio before to stream music from my laptop to my desktop without much success. I attribute my past failures to my lack of understanding of the client/server model that pulseaudio follows. Trust me when I say it’s important to learn the necessery terminology to setup pulseaudio, you’ll end up quite confused otherwise!

This diagram represents the setup we’re creating:

Diagram of PA network streaming setup

Setup the server (the machine that is attached to an audio device):

Add the following lines to /etc/pulse/default.pa

  load-module module-native-protocol-tcp auth-ip-acl=127.0.0.1;192.168.0.0/24 auth-anonymous=1
  load-module module-zeroconf-publish

The first line sets up a TCP server for pulseaudio allowing remote sound sources to be utilized (clients can be anonymous as well). The second line sets up zerconf publishing by the avahi daemon (enable with systemctl enable avahi-daemon && systemctl start avahi-daemon on Arch), the clients that will attach to the server will also need the avahi deamon running to be informed of the pulseaudio server you’ve just set up.

Setup the client (the machine that you want audio to be streamed from)

Add the following lines to /etc/pulse/default.pa load-module module-zeroconf-discover Understandably this module searches out for other pulseaudio servers on the LAN.

load-module module-zeroconf-discover

Restart pulseaudio and install pasystray or padevchooser to set your sink (desktop) on the client/source (laptop).

Sources