PulseAudio, sound daemons and screensavers

I had to debug a network issue that was caused by* PulseAudio (multicasting 1.5Mb/s of audio was saturating my wifi, which was preventing anyone from being able to get anywhere.), and in the process of learning about the problem to fix it, I learned something about PulseAudio.

It's amazingly over-engineered. Enough that it makes convenient things that wouldn't normally be possible. For example, any app can register itself as a source or sink. Registering as a source is kinda important for a sound daemon that wants to multiplex audio from multiple apps, but as a sink?

However, I keep thinking about media player visualizations and how most of them suck. Likewise, I think about screensavers and how they could be better.

Take a screensaver, have it register as an audio sink, and let the audio have an impact on the screensaver. For example, I'm looking at the "fiberlamp" screensaver. It looks like it uses some sort of a physics engine to have the fibers hanging down realistically, and when the screensaver starts, the thing starts off with a bit of a bounce before the whole thing settles.

You could vibrate the base of the fiberlamp in response to the sound fed out by PulseAudio, causing the fibers to shake and oscillate in response. You could take advantage of the fiber-optic metaphor, and feed a raster image into the base of the fiber bundle that looks like a more traditional visualization, so the fiber tips look like part of a stretched spherical mapping of that base.

There are a lot of possibilities when you can hook into a sound daemon like that.

* "caused by" is rather nebulous...One could just as easily point out that I shouldn't have enabled the multicast. Or I should have had the wifi block it. Yada yada.