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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?
While the idea of using several soundcards and OSS is quite sound, this is a problem which has already been solved by professional audio installers several times over, with equipment custom-tailored for this exact purpose. IMHO, you should get a professional consultation from a home theatre/automation business. The difficulty is not the soundcards or even the software, it's integrating functional control panels (with displays) into each room that will prove to be the most difficult. While you certainly *can* do this with off-the-shelf parts, the pros will always do this sort of thing better.
Good luck!
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!
Ah yes, if there's one thing the nice folks on the AV Science Forum don't understand well, it's budget constraints. How many people can afford to go out and buy Pocket PCs to replace their remote controls?
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I have a home audio system which is customised to my own needs. I started off at http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/MP3-Box-HOWTO.html and built diskless systems such as this for all the rooms in my house, and can use all independently of each other.
They all run off a standard computer which I turned into a server when it became out of date (500mhz K6-2, 384MB).
It's very cheap to build the diskless systems and the only extra expense you'll have is the CAT5 cabling over the house (if you're like me though, your house is already CAT5 capable).
Tim
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