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Build a Multi-Output MP3 Server?
z80 asks: "I'm rebuilding my house and I am thinking about fitting speakers in every room of the house and pulling some massive amount of cables in the walls. I also want to control and send the output to each set of speakers from the same source, and was thinking that a PC, with 4-6 soundcards, would do the trick, and there are of course a couple of questions I have. What kind of hardware would be required to be able to stream up to six different MP3's through six soundcards at the same time ? Can it even be done? What kind of software can be used to do it? Which OS? How can it be remotely controlled? With respect to the last question, I'm thinking about mounting a couple of flat displays around the house connected to old PC's that run some sort of connection (VNC maybe) to the mp3 server." This is a topic Ask Slashdot tackled three years ago. Now, with applications like Ardour showing off the power of Open Source frameworks like JACK, it seems like building such a machine might not be as hard as it once was. For those of you who have managed to build something like this, what did you do and what hurdles did you have to navigate before things were working? How would you set up a machine to run independent audio to 4 or more rooms?
The best place for questions like this is the AV Science Forum. Lots of people doing all sorts of home-theater/home-audio projects. Look in the "Home Theater Computers" section.
There are several options for what you're looking to do these days. My brother is doing a similar thing, but he's using 802.11b for control (through Girder) and PocketPCs for remotes!
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/
Get an M-Audio Delta 410.
It has 4 inputs, and 10 outputs.
Common sense is not so common.
Bad idea. It's MP3... just put an MP3 player in the room and use network cable. You can buy an old Vectra (that would do this fine) for like $50. Or you can use dedicated audio widgets like the very open mp3elf.
Yeah, you may be able to hack something together with a single PC and multiple sound cards in a few months of Sundays. But you could also just buy, off-the-shelf, as many of these dandy little things as you need. A single server can service as many of them as you'd care to stack up. They would be easy to add on as you require them, without having to run any speaker cable at all--a wireless bridge or a single CAT5 run works peachy. DHCP enabled, supports multiple server OSs (mine is off my Debian box but they have Windows or Mac installers as well), wireless remote, Web, or command line interfaces all supported.
I've only got one, but it works awesome and if I ever decide I want to put a different sound system into another room, I can just buy another module and hook it up to the same server--instant access to all the MP3s and playlists that I've already created. The sound quality is great and it take hardly any resources, either server-side or network. I highly recommend it.
No relation to Happy Monkey
I have to admit, I'm a head-over-heels lover of my SliMP3s.
/. ticker every 15 minutes on each unit, just because I can.
The reasons you should be too:
It's platform independent, but is also really tightly integrated into your itunes/musicmatch/winamp playlists. A single server, whatever your religion, can saturate the network before the server gets bogged down. This said, I recommend a Mac server, just because iTunes is amazing, and I really don't like having to deal with Linux config when I'm not being paid to.
$200/unit, and all the playlists on your network can be streamed from one location. At 10/100 speeds, it'd take about 15-20 of the things to saturate your network, if they were all running at the same time.
All of your libraries and playlists will be shared and distributed thruout the house. Doesn't matter if you're going to a boom box with a ghetto-wired cassete adaptor. Run cat5 to the room (cheap), and choose the most suited amplification method, from powered speakers, to a MacGyvered boom box, to a proper receiver.
The company is super cool, comes out with feature updates constantly, and the server software is open source, should you choose to use the built-in Perl powered httpd server versus just using a remote.
I'm not an employee of Slim Devices, just an insanely happy customer. That's a whole lot of elegance in a small, inexpensive package.
And it plays a mean game of Tetris, gives my weather report, and does a