[Alsa-user] Poor man's network transparency.

[Rene H. <ren...@gm...>]

Good day.

I am setting up basic, "manual" network-transparency on my local network 
using alsa. Getting sound data from "server" to "player" is easily 
accomplished with the "file" plugin and netcat:

[rene@server ~]$ cat .asoundrc
pcm.player {
         type file
         slave.pcm "null"
         file "| nc player <port>"
}
[rene@server ~]$ aplay -D player foo.wav

... where on "player" I have a listener running that does:

"nc -l -p <port> server | aplay -t raw -f cd"

(never mind this only working until aplay on "server" closes its output 
for now; it's only a minimal example)

I was wondering/expecting if/that there is a nicer way to do this on 
"player", though. Specifically, I was expecting to be able to mirror the 
server-side of things by defining a "server" PCM on player that 
*captured* from "nc -l -p <port> server |", after which I'd use a 
daemonized "alsaloop" as my actual player-application.

Am I right in believing this to not be the case? I tried all sorts of 
variants of "infile" or slave definitions, but nothing worked. It seems 
a little unexpected though, so thought I'd ask before giving up on it.

(please note by the way that I'm aware of the more involved solutions 
such as pulse or nas; I'm trying to avoid them).

Regards,
Rene