[Voyage-linux] Is it possible to play my desktop audio via pulseaudio to MPD by streaming

[Mark Schlegel]

I found out this is possible and I have it working, however streaming 
pulseaudio through icecast and darkice servers cause quite
a large delay (10 secs or so) for me.  So playing a youtube album on the 
desktop and streaming it to my USB DAC via Voyage MPD works
fine since a delay doesn't really matter but playing a youtube video 
where you care that the sound matches the video doesn't work.

I basically defined a "mystream.ogg" recorded stream in the darkice.cfg 
file, then I start icecast 2.0 as a service then run darkice via my 
normal user account. The darkice cfg file should have "pulse" as the 
device, a sample rate of 44100 and a paSourceName of "stream.monitor". I 
then removed the whole unused "icecast-0" section and modified the 
icecast2-0 section to be bitrateMode of "vbr"  (which is variable), 
quality of 1.0, format = vorbis, server = <ip of my desktop on the LAN>, 
port and password (left as default), mountPoint = mystream.ogg

You can then look in pulseaudio volume control and in the recording tab 
you'll see:

"ALSA plug-in [darkice] ALSA Capture from Monitor of Internal Audio 
Analog Stereo"

something played on youtube via Firefox will show as the monitor bar 
moving, you'll then probably want to
slide the Playback volume down low to not also hear the desktop speakers 
(you only want to hear the audio on
MPD's speakers).  Now in your MPD client, create a matching internet 
radio station URL:

mine was to give an example:

http://192.168.1.105:8000/mystream.ogg

Note how it matches the darkice.cfg "mountPoint", that has to be the 
same to work.

Now play your radio station and it should work.  Note for simplicity I 
saved this station as a
playlist called "local pulseaudio" so I don't have to recreate that station

Mark