1. Pulseaudio Equalizer Windows 10
2. Pulseaudio-module-bluetooth Windows 10

Alternatives to PulseAudio for Windows with any license JACK Audio Connection Kit JACK is a professional sound server daemon that provides real-time, low latency connections for both audio and MIDI data between applications that implement its API. PulseAudio is a sound server for Linux and Mac OS. It also works on Windows operating system. It works like a proxy. The sounds in your applications passes through PulseAudio. That way, you can use various techniques to manipulate these sounds before you can hear them.

I have Linux box with Ubuntu + PulseAudio network server installed. I can stream audio from my laptop (with Linux installed too) to the box over local network.

I've recently installed Windows 7 into my laptop. I want to stream my laptop audio to the box. Could someone help me setup audio streaming over network over PulseAudio from Windows to Linux box?

6 Answers

The second part of the answer https://superuser.com/a/378000/65570 (the Windows part) probably applies to your case:

either use an old Windows esd driver, or the linco tool.

AFAIU, there is no pulseaudio sound output driver for Windows as of now, nor even the pulseaudio output module for VLC has been ever built for Windows. (This would allow at least an easy way to output the sound from VLC to your remote pulseaudio server.)

There are many success stories using Jack streaming server.

One of them:

Pulseaudio Equalizer Windows 10

A really simple solution with minimal software is to stream audio using VLC as RTP server and setting up a RTP source in pulseaudio.

I was successful with using JACK, though unlike Eir Nym's answer, the sound is playing from the Linux box as you requested. I did a small write-up of it here: https://gist.github.com/kotarou3/3813bbf7833a0e4618f7fbe8a377872d

The advantage of using JACK over PulseAudio would be lower latency (provided you configure it correctly). Doesn't really matter if you're just playing music, but things like games and recording work needs the low latency.

Partially quoting for posterity:

Tested on Ubuntu 16.04 and Windows 10 Redstone 1

Pulseaudio-module-bluetooth Windows 10

Both boxes need to be on the same network (such that multicast packets can be passed between them)

Installing

Linux

1. Setup JACK (easy to do with Cadence)

Windows

1. Install JACK and ASIO Bridge on the Windows box
2. Run regsvr32 32bitsJackRouter.dll and regsvr32 64bitsJackRouter.dll from JACK installation directory
3. Modify 32bitsJackRouter.ini and 64bitsJackRouter.ini to match your channel and sample config
4. (Optional) Set the ASIO Bridge (Hi-Fi Audio) input as the default playback device

Running

1. Start the netjack2 server on Linux with jack_load netmanager (probably also possible to add to .jackdrc for it to autoload)
2. Run JACK NetDriver on Windows (it's in the Start menu), or jackd -R -d net
3. A new device named the hostname of the Windows box should have appeared on the Linux JACK patch panel (Catia if you're using Cadence). Connect it as you see fit (Note: Channels might not match up as expected if you have more than 2).
4. Run ASIO Bridge (also in the Start menu), turn ASIO on, and set the ASIO device to JackRouter
5. The ASIO Bridge should have automatically set up routes to the system device in the Windows JACK patch panel. You can double check with qjackctl (Jack Control in the Start menu) → Connections and connect them if not

I've altered a program found on internet and created WLStream. It enables you to stream audio from a Windows output device so Pulse Audio will be able to play it back on a Linux host. The communication between the two is done with plink from Putty. There's a delay in the audio stream caused by the network, I'm sure if you alter the privilege on the TCP packet sent from plink or change your router's configuration as you would for VOIP it'll reduce the audio's stream lag but my research didn't go any further. WLStream can be compiled using Visual Studio 2017 and there's a pre-compiled from the last version here.

It took less than 5 minutes to setup. It supports unicast and multicast raw streams from Windows at multiple sample rates. It has listeners for windows, ALSA and pulse-audio.

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