What is RoarAudio?

RoarAudio is a server for audio mixing. It's main purpose is to mix audio from different clients before sending it to it's outputs. Those outputs may for example be soundcards. It also supports network clients because of it's full network transparency.

What architectures and operating systems RoarAudio runs on?

RoarAudio should run on all POSIX operating systems. This includes GNU/Linux and all BSDs. In addition it has limited Win32 support. It is designed to run on as many architectures as possible. Most of it works with integer arithmetic and should run even on platforms with a slow FPU.

Main features

• fully network transparent. Network support for UNIX Domain Sockets, TCP/IP and DECnet
• synchronized audio streams
• multiple audio streams per client
• Vorbis comments like meta data for each audio stream
• support for "legacy" clients via libroaresd, libroararts, libroaryiff
• support for PulseAudio and OpenBSD's sndio clients via libroarpulse and libroarsndio
• supported by many players: including all EsounD and libao players any many more!
• mixing clients at individual levels like an analog mixer
• server and client side support for common codecs like Ogg Vorbis, Speex, FLAC and many more
• support for 8, 16, 24 and 32 bit per sample. Mixer resolution up to 64 bit
• and many more...

How does it work?

Basically the client (a player, a game, ...) gives it's audio data to libroar (or any other RoarAudio client library, like μRoar). libroar connects to the server, locally or over a network connection. The server mixes the audio and streams it to the outputs. A output can for example be a soundcard. It can also streams it back to so called 'monitoring clients'. Monitoring clients get the mixed data to write it to disk or stream it to an streaming server like icecast.

Events

• There was a presentation about RoaringBox and friends on 2010-02-05 in Schwetzingen, Germany, at UUGRN's FIXME.
• I held a talk (in german) about RoarAudio with workshop (Install, basic usage) on 2009-07-04 again in Schwetzingen, Germany, at UUGRN's 10 year party.
• I held a talk (in german) about RoarAudio on 2009-02-06 in Schwetzingen, Germany at UUGRN's FIXME. All infos can be found here.