HaileyAug 20, 2023

Introducing Bark! Low-latency multi-receiver live-sync lossless audio streaming for local networks. It's like Sonos, but open source, so nobody can brick your devices remotely. It's also written in Rust :)

https://github.com/haileys/bark

It sends 48khz uncompressed float32 data over UDP multicast. It can achieve playback sync to within hundreds of microseconds in ideal conditions, and usually to within a millisecond.

I've been working on it in my spare time over the past week, and I'm pretty happy with how it's shaped up. I have three receivers setup and it works remarkably well at keeping everything in sync as I walk around my house. For now it only really works on Linux, and supports Pipewire (and Pulse in theory), but there's no huge impediment to making it truly cross-platform.

It also features a fancy live stats subcommand, which can used on any computer in the same multicast domain to watch the status of the stream cluster:

GitHub - haileys/bark: live sync audio streaming for local networks

live sync audio streaming for local networks. Contribute to haileys/bark development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub
Show threadHaileyAug 20, 2023

it is so so so cool to hear some music playing in my lounge room, and then on my desktop run `systemctl --user start bark-receive`, and hear the exact same thing out of my computer speakers.

The stream source is hooked to line-in on the lounge room server, so it can cast to the network anything playing from my cheap little spotify/airplay/bluetooth/etc stream box, or the Apple TV, or my FM radio even.

The latency added by Bark is basically imperceptible too!

Show threadFixsternAug 20, 2023
@hailey is that all ethernet devices? How does wifi do? How big is the jitter buffer/input latency? The project sound exactly what i was searching earlier! Thanks for sharing!
Show thread⚳ rapid unscheduled assembly ⚳
@dunkelstern @hailey Wifi does _terribly_ since it'll be stuck at 6 Mbit/sec max
Aug 20, 2023 at 4:14pmWeb