Re: [PLUG] Low-Latency Audio

This is by no means a complete answer but I did some research into using a low latency kernel with regular Ubuntu rather than Ubuntu studio and at least what I found at the time is the low latency real-time kernel is poorly supported because development has halted as of late as does sometimes happen to open source projects. That being said a little bit of googling turned up that you can use libpam to achieve low latency, but the devil is in the details and I am not going to say that you can do this without recompiling your kernel anyway. Things may have changed since I last looked this up, I am shooting from the hip with this answer. I hope that this is somewhat helpful and I hope that you are safe in the pandemic. Thanks.

On Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 6:57 AM Casey Bralla via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:

So as my marriage collapses, I've got to move out of the house and into
an apartment.

In my house, I've wired the house to play music throughout. I've run
shielded RCA-phono cable from a computer in the basement to various HiFi
stereo amplifiers and speakers in the living room, den, and bedroom.
The computer uses MPD to play music continuously as my own internal
radio station. (All music that I like, NONE that I don't like, and no
commercials, 24 hours per day.) Each room has it's own dedicated
amplifier and good quality speakers, fed by the "aux" input from the
shielded RCA cable. I can walk from one room to the other and hear the
same music playing, perfectly in sync. I can adjust the volume
separately in each room without affecting the sound in the other rooms.

When I move into an apartment, I won't be able to run this cable, but
still want to have the same level of service. I could encode the music
and distribute it via wireless networking with a raspberry pi at each
end, but I suspect the audio would be crappy from the Pi, and the
coding/decoding latency means that music played in 1 room would be out
of sync with music from another.

I've used a FM transmitter in the past, but the sound quality is
actually pretty poor compared to a good flac rip from a CD.

My current idea is to use a bluetooth transmitter on the MPD computer,
and bluetooth receivers at each of the amplifiers. But, bluetooth is
notoriously flaky and I want this to be a "it just works" setup, like my
current shielded cable.

So, I've still asking my self these questions, and am hoping that
someone here knows these answers:

1. Is it possible to "permanently" bond a bluetooth
transmitter/receiver? (I don't want the bluetooth receiver to try to
bond with my cell phone when I power up the system, for example.)

2. Is it possible to ensure that bluetooth bonding automatically
resumes if one or both of the transmitter/receiver is shut off and later
powered on?

3. Is there any other low cost RCA-type audio transmitter/receiver
available out there?

I would appreciate any comments or suggestions. TIA!

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