I realised I forgot to put a link in the original post lol so I have edited it, but here is the link in case: https://github.com/haileys/bark

it is so so so cool to hear some music playing in my lounge room, and then on my desktop run `systemctl --user start bark-receive`, and hear the exact same thing out of my computer speakers.

The stream source is hooked to line-in on the lounge room server, so it can cast to the network anything playing from my cheap little spotify/airplay/bluetooth/etc stream box, or the Apple TV, or my FM radio even.

The latency added by Bark is basically imperceptible too!

@hailey this looks really great! what are you using for your devices?

@hailey that’s super neat. I really wish there was better AES67 & PTP support in Linux, because all this stuff done closed-source in a pro audio could come across to open source and consumer network stuff so easily. One day I’ll have time to work on it.

@hailey I haven’t looked at the source but surely sending audio from macOS should be easy enough. It doesn’t have to be integrated with macOS audio to be useful (could pipe directly from mp1g123 say)

@hailey @tperfitt this is cool as hell

@hailey @tperfitt This reminds me of the (closed source, commercial) Skaa tech - https://www.skaastore.com/pages/aboutskaa or (very pricy) Dante - https://www.audinate.com/meet-dante/what-is-dante. Very cool to see an OSS take on this! How well does this perform on wireless?

@hailey Sounds a bit like snapcast, which I've been using for multiroom audio for a year or so. (Snapcast was kind of hard to set up, but that may have been more about my devices and network.) Is Bark comparable, or aiming for something different?

@hailey why did you choose f32?

@hailey that's impressive, i look into it with joy 💜🎵

@hailey Well done! It looks like a very nice solution, I'll try it.

@hailey you did this in a WEEK!?

@hailey bark

@hailey This is cool. I’ve been looking at this stuff (along with AES67, Livewire, Dante, and friends.

@hailey Nice!

I've done that with VLC in the past, but it wasn't ideal.

@hailey this looks interesting.

How do you deal with long-term clock drift between your receivers? Is there some logic to resample the audio to match the clocks or do you wait until the buffer over/underflows and then jump?

@hailey Congratulations. Have you made a feature comparison with Snapcast? https://mjaggard.github.io/snapcast/ I've tried that recently and it's nice, though it doesn't play well with laptop sleeps

@hailey I wonder how easy it would be to implement the receiving end on an ESP32...

@hailey
Nice !
Perhaps it could be a good addon for #kodi

@hailey That sounds super cool!

This is UDP so you don't get ACKs, right? Is the network latency determined with a backchannel of some kind that feeds back receiver timestamps to the source?

Any idea how usable/stable it can be between two hosts that are not on the same LAN?

@hailey using cpal for audio IO and environment variables for specifying PulseAudio or Pipewire devices is an interesting design. Do you plan to support other OSes? If not, why not use the PipeWire or PulseAudio bindings directly?

@hailey awesome project! Great to hear how well it works.

@hailey AFAIK Pipewire has been lacking a solution for networked audio, so this is neat!

@hailey@hails.orgits super cool

@hailey wanna try it, just because of it's name :D

@hailey that's wonderful work

@hailey how does it compare to ROC in less than ideal conditions?

@hailey oh that rules!

@hailey
What does this get over the open source aes67 implementation?

@hailey
(Asking because I've got a fair bit of Dante hardware, but alternatives are always interesting)

@hailey very cool. i had this on my todo list heh, so thank you for saving me the effort

@hailey@hails love the sound of this, thank you! Gonna check it out.

@hailey going to give it a try and thanks for your hard work

@hailey First thing that came to mind is that a Pi with speakers attached would be a good place to start for this. It's not the super spacial thing, but just to have decent sound around the house would be good.

@hailey Sry, I'm new to this, so can you please confirm/correct?
You throw a bunch of Linux machines with speakers attached into your network, configure them all as sinks, they become visible on your source machine (e.g.Desktop PC), you connect them via CLI and audio transmission happens over Bark then? Is it really as easy as that?

@hailey woah. I spent 3 months of weekends on a project pretty much exactly like this for an internship a few years ago, and you did it in a week? That's awesome!

The one thing I couldn't get right was packet ordering. The audio always came out garbled, I was using a handmade data structure that acted as a ring buffer that inserted packets based on a packet count. Will for sure be looking through your implementation :)

@hailey super cool project! I am still building my house out but this would be super great to have for house music!

@hailey Thank you! I'm looking for ways to get off Volumio. This gets me closer to that.

@hailey ohhhhhh, like!

@hailey wait what’s that about Sonos remotely bricking things

@hailey interesting! Thanks for sharing :)

@hailey thats amazing!

I'm wondering: would you be able to stream audio to the streambox, which in return distributes it to the speakers/computers?

That would be insane!

@hailey
@Incognitim

Now, we need Meow! where the sound randomly comes out of a speaker for a few seconds leading you on a wild goose chase to figure out what the sound is.

@hailey This is awesome! I haven't used multi-output network streaming since the early PulseAudio days, so it's cool to see work being done to make the experience even easier/better!

@hailey super cool. Turns out you can do really neat things if you synchronize clocks well!

@hailey I’d love to have the receiver part of something like this on a phone. Bluetooth audio has really high latencies, which sucks for e.g. using a computer with a screen reader, which is my primary use case here. Currently, the solutions are dedicated gaming wireless headphones (expensive, require a dongle and often shady / barely accessible software), or 10 feet of audio cable, which is the solution I’m using right now.

@hailey
Looks very interesting. What does it need (hardware? Which kind of raspberry is enough to run it?)

@hailey this sounds great! Thanks for your work!

@hailey oh that's very cool!

I think I'm going to have to experiment with this later. Maybe combined with one of the web music UIs

@hailey out of curiosity: have you heard about OpenHome? It's based on UPnP which is kinda problematic, but I wonder how it compares to your solution.

@hailey Multicast is bad. Don't use multicast.

@hailey this is something i've been looking for, i'll have to give it a test! i have a google onhub wireless router which has a pretty beefy speaker built in (for some reason, the stock firmware barely uses it) and, like you mentioned to someone else, i tried snapcast but had serious issues getting it working on openwrt, and networked pulse wasn't cooperating with me either, since i don't use pulse when i can help it..

@hailey this is awesome! Thanks, I’ve been wanting an audio distribution system in my office for a while, now I know how I’m spending next week.

@hailey Oh, this is *extremely* cool. My house has very solid walls and my bluetooth headphones don't work in different rooms as a result. I've been looking for a setup where I can stream audio from my PC to my phone via WLAN for a while, all existing approaches I've found have pretty big deficiencies. Out of interest, do you know of a simple route to getting a client working on Android, or is it a custom protocol?

@hailey
Ooh that's an important problem to solve, thanks! As much as I like my sonos products, their vendor lock-in is nothing less than scary 🤐

@hailey I'm curious how this compares to logitech's squeezebox system. Both server and (software) client are open source too.

@hailey bloody hell that's amazing. I'm not super linux techy but if this ever hits windows I'm gunna be on it like a fat kit on a smarty

@hailey weren't you looking for something similar a while ago @solene ?

@hailey I am *so* looking forward to giving this a try when I get a spare moment!

@hailey Amazing!

@hailey super cool! I worked at Sonos for 6+ years. Still love their gear, but hate that perfectly good gen1 speakers are a lot less useful now.

@hailey shared in the Sonos alumni Slack as well 😀

@hailey I've been using ROC toolkit at my hackerspace with a similar goal in mind. I started porting it to Rust but never finished it. The nice thing is that it is using a correction channel by default to avoid glitches, which is quite simple to implement in Rust with the available libraries, it's worth looking at it. It's also already available in pipewire.

@hailey This is very cool! Out of curiosity, does it share design ideas (or more) with Snapcast? https://github.com/badaix/snapcast/ I don't think Snapcast can get to such small sync delays, but it works fine for syncing music.

@hailey hailey i think u should use opus

@hailey@hails.org Holy shit, this is awesome. Do you have to use any fancy networking support, like any of the time-sensitive networking extensions?

@hailey
Ayo @Venn have you seen this

@hailey very Impressive!

@hailey cabbit mention spotted :3

cool project! much better than pulse tcp

@hailey This looks really cool, I have used snapcast in the past but always found the manual sync adjustments tricky to get right

@hailey this sounds amazing, I have been looking for years for some way to recreate this technology that I had in 2002 "squeezebox" device

@hailey Very nice, thanks!

@hailey wow! Good stuff.

@hailey This looks fantastic. Can you elaborate on any particular differences between your project and https://github.com/badaix/snapcast?

@hailey How does it compare to snapcast? (which we are currently using at our hackerspace) And I don't just mean the "it's written in Rust" part :)

That sounds super cool! Thank you @hailey!

@hailey Ah yes, XKCD 927'd AES67/ST 2110-30 😜

Nah that's pretty cool, not needing PTP is very nice for a home environment where clocking multiple sources isn't necessary, how are you handling clock recovery and the potential for out of order or delayed packets? Just by reconstructing the stream by timestamps from a buffer of incoming data or something spicy?

@hailey that looks absolutely rad! I'll check it out, when I find the time.

@hailey I have been looking for exactly this! Will check it out.