Local audio¶

Local audio through ALSA¶

In the config file, you can select ALSA for local audio. This is the default.

When using ALSA, the server will try to synchronize playback with AirPlay. You can adjust the synchronization in the config file.

For most setups the default values in the config file should work. If they don't, there is help here

Local audio through PipeWire¶

In the config file, you can select PipeWire for local audio. PipeWire is the default audio system on most current Linux distributions; if wpctl or pactl already work on your system, it's generally the right choice over plain ALSA or PulseAudio.

PipeWire also handles Bluetooth output similarly to PulseAudio - once a Bluetooth speaker is paired and connected (e.g. via bluetoothctl), it appears to PipeWire as a regular sink, and OwnTone can target it like any other. If it is the default sink, OwnTone will use it with minimal configuration

By default OwnTone's volume slider controls its own stream's software gain. To have it drive the shared system sink volume instead (the same one wpctl set-volume controls), some extra config is needed - see PipeWire.

Local audio, Bluetooth and more through PulseAudio¶

In the config file, you can select PulseAudio for local audio. In addition to local audio, PulseAudio also supports an array of other targets, e.g. Bluetooth or DLNA. However, PulseAudio does require some setup, so here is a separate page with some help on that: PulseAudio

Note that if you select PulseAudio the "card" setting in the config file has no effect. Instead all sound cards detected by PulseAudio will be listed as speakers by OwnTone.

You can adjust the latency of PulseAudio playback in the config file.