So, being back in Australia, the sun is shining, I'm sat on my sofa and I can't help but feel like I'm on summer holidays. So I want to crank some Uh Huh Her on the stereo.
We have an Airport Express, but using would normally require using Steph's computer, or the computer downstairs. So instead I thought I'd give the support in PulseAudio a go.
It's pretty easy to set up. Install the (Debian/Ubuntu) packages paprefs pavucontrol pulseaudio-module-raop pulseaudio-module-zeroconf (Fedora packages might have different names). Run paprefs and tick the option to discover Airtunes devices.
Then using pavucontrol you can set the output device for an application.
It's not perfect yet, it can sometimes get stuck skipping, and you have to move the stream to your local computer and back to the Airport (apparently the buffering is just implemented using windowing, but maybe needs to be smarter?), but it's working pretty good. Still, it's insanely neat, and because it's in PulseAudio, you can redirect any stream you like (not just from your music player).
It's not just Airtunes either. You can stream to other PulseAudio servers (discovered over mDNS) as well as UPnP media renderers.
