PulseAudio Loopback Switch
The goal behind this switch is to allow a very flexible whole home audio system based upon PulseAudio.
For example, for a system with a 7.1 surround sound card, and 3 instances of MPD running, it is possible to quickly route the output of any MPD instance to any of the 8 possible (4 stereo) channels on the sound card, by loading/unloading a loopback module. This loading/unloading functionality is provided by this component. When the switch is on
, the loopback module is loaded. When the switch is off
, the module is not loaded.
The benefit of this approach is that this audio routing can occur without modifying the design-time configuration of MPD or PulseAudio.
This component uses a TCP connection to control a local or remote PulseAudio server. So there are no local dependencies.
To enable this switch, add the following lines to your configuration.yaml
file:
# Example configuration.yaml entry
switch:
- platform: pulseaudio_loopback
Configuration variables:
- sink_name (Required): The name of the Pulseaudio sink that will receive the audio.
- source_name (Required): The name of the Pulseaudio source that will supply the audio.
- name (Optional): Name of the switch.
- host (Optional): The IP address or host name of the PulseAudio server. If not specified, 127.0.0.1 is used.
- port (Optional): The port that Pulseaudio is listening on. Defaults to 4712.
- buffer_size (Optional): How much data to load from Pulseaudio at once. Default is 1KB.
- tcp_timeout (Optional): How long to wait for a response from Pulseaudio before giving up. Default is 3 seconds.
This component relies on raw TCP commands to PulseAudio. In order for PulseAudio to accept commands with this component, module-cli-protocol
must be loaded on the PulseAudio server.