Audio

Amplifier and speakers

The amplifier and speakers were donated by Jehan. Only the tape input on the amp seems to work, and so the sound is somewhat muddled, but turning the volume down on the input device and up on the amp keeps that minimal. We should get one of the other inputs working.

The amp is hooked up to the laptop on the shelf, which is the space server. Its hostname is hairball.local (using zeroconf, which should be default enabled on most gnu/linux and OS X machines, but not on windows).

The space server is running a pulseaudio server which is announced using zeroconfig.

Streaming audio to the space server

In order to stream audio from your computer to hairball.local, you need to have pulseaudio installed. This is default in Ubuntu. You also need some way of switching between local sound output and network sound output.

Check if padevchooser is available for your system:

 apt-cache search padevchooser

If it is, then install it:

 sudo aptitude install padevchooser

If not (it's not available on newer Ubuntu systems), then you can use pasystray. You need to add this PPA:

 sudo add-apt-repository ppa:christoph-gysin/pasystray
 sudo aptitude update
 sudo aptitude install pasystray

If you're using Unity (default in Ubuntu) allow systray icons from all applications (since Unity blocks them):

 gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist "['all']"

Start padevchooser or pasystray.

A system tray icon should appear in the top right corner. Click it and choose pulse@hairball as the default server, then as default sink, choose the option called something like "pulse@hairball: Buil-in Audio Analog Stereo".

Start some program that plays audio (if the program was already running you may have to restart it after changing sinks).

The audio should play out of the sudo room sound system speakers.