Summary

Instructions on how to get Pulseaudio working on your slug. It takes a bit of work to get it working and performance has yet to be evaluated. If you are looking for an pain free soultion to streaming audio consider a commercial platform such as an Apple Airport Express.

Performance

The slug handles PulseAudio quite ok given it's specifications. Pulse CPU usage is 15-25%. The biggest bottleneck seem to be network performance. This is probably related to Pulse using TCP.

Hardware

• Turboslug
• 1 GB USB stick'' A bit on the short side I must say in retrospect
• Cheap USB soundcard with C-Media chipset'' Manufactured by sinovoice. About 10EUR. For more information on supported cards go to [SlugAsAudioPlayer]

Software

• Debian Lenny
• Alsa. Advanced Linux sound architecture
• Madplay. Music player supporting integer decoding. Perfect for the slug due to it's lack of FPU.
• Pulseaudio. The pulseaudio deamon
• sample.mp3. A sample mp3 file

1. Connect USB soundcard and confirm that it shows up $ lsusb

lsusb should list something like: Bus 001 Device 002: ID 05e3:0608 Genesys Logic, Inc. USB-2.0 4-Port HUB

2. Install alsa and madplay

1. apt-get install alsa-base libasound2-plugins madplay --no-install-recommmends

3. Copy an Mp3 file to your slug directory and Play a file using Madplay.

1. madplay 101.mp3

If you hear sound everything should be fine.

For some reason no /etc/dsp shows up for my card and Madplay throw me the following MPEG Audio Decoder 0.15.2 (beta) - Copyright (C) 2000-2004 Robert Leslie et al. audio: /dev/dsp: No such file or directory

I found a solution for this: http://groups.google.se/group/linux.debian.user/browse_thread/thread/8aed68261457d77e(approve sites)

1. apt-get install oss-compat

I get the following error Setting up oss-compat (0.0.4+nmu2) ... FATAL: Module snd_seq_oss not found.

anyways, /dev/dsp is added and Madplay now works.

4. Install pulseaudio ignoring the unnecessary recommended packages to save space on the device.

1. apt-get install pulseaudio --no-install-recommends

5. Configure pulseaudio server for network access

1. nano /etc/default.pa

More to come..