i am trying to enable pulseaudio to go over the network between 2 Debian 12 machines. but for some reason the option is grayed out.
i have installed the pulseaudio-module-zeroconf package on both machines and after reboot the option is still grayed out.
what am i doing wrong? what has changed since i last needed to do this in 2014? is my memory THAT bad? what did i forget to do here? or is pulseaudio’s network transport just not allowed anymore?
What is pactl info | grep "Server Name" saying?
It’s possible you’re actually on PipeWire and I’m not sure if the network stuff is available there.
on one machine
mathew2214@Aisling:~$ pactl info | grep "Server Name"
Server Name: pulseaudio
on the other machine:
mathew2214@TESSA1:~$ pactl info | grep "Server Name"
Server Name: PulseAudio (on PipeWire 0.3.65)
so it seems that one of my machines IS using pipewire. but that doesnt explain why the option is grayed out on Aisling as well.
im way out of my area of expertise trying to understand the pros and cons of each, and trying to understand why 2 debian 12 machines got setup so differently by Debian’s installer.
how can i enable the network transport here?
Well the option says “Make discoverable devices available” which would require discovering a device in the first place. If no device is detected the option may just be greyed out.
No idea. Are they both fresh installs? If one is older then it stands to reason that the older install that used to default to Pulseaudio didn’t get changed automatically. Most distros do upgrades that way.
Neither are fresh installs. Both are upgrades from previous Debian versions.
It is a good idea to try and revert TESSA1 to pulse audio without pipe wire? Or is there another more modern solution to network sound?
You can try it, but whether it’s a good idea or not I don’t know. The switch is just enabling and disabling the respective services though.
I don’t know about alternate solutions, I’m not an audio guy unfortunately.
Can’t seem to find any good reason to revert TESSA1 to pure pulse audio. Especially since Aisling is already running pure pulse audio and the network options still aren’t available.