Mutually Exclusive PulseAudio streams
The question of mutually exclusive streams in PulseAudio came to mind earlier, and thanks to Arun and Jens in #gupnp I discovered the PulseAudio supports them already. The use-case here is a system where there are many ways of playing music, but instead of mixing them PA should pause the playing stream when a new one starts.
Configuring this with PulseAudio is trivial, using the module-role-cork module:
$ pactl load-module module-role-cork trigger_roles=music cork_roles=music
This means that when a new stream with the “music” role starts, “cork” (pause to everyone else) all streams that have the “music” role. Handily this module won’t pause the trigger stream, so this implements exclusive playback.
Testing is simple with gst-launch
$ PULSE_PROP='media.role=music' gst-launch-0.10 audiotestsrc ! pulsesink Setting pipeline to PAUSED ... Pipeline is PREROLLING ... Pipeline is PREROLLED ... Setting pipeline to PLAYING ... New clock: GstPulseSinkClock
At this point, starting another gst-launch results in this stream being paused:
Setting state to PAUSED as requested by /GstPipeline:pipeline0/GstPulseSink:pulsesink0...
Note that it won’t automatically un-cork when the newer stream disappears, but for what I want this is the desired behaviour anyway.
4 thoughts on “Mutually Exclusive PulseAudio streams”
Hmm I haven’t seen this functionality at all yet… How do you set-up roles? is it indicated by the application?
Could I set my music stream to stop when anything else starts playing, and resume when that’s done?
The roles are set up by the application, the simplest way being to set an environment variable like I did with PULSE_PROP=’media.role=music’. You’d have to speak to the Pulse people about making it auto-resume, I’m not sure.
Great tip! It worked perfectly, and my music application does auto-resume.
This does not work for me. The triggering stream gets muted too.
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