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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?
It seems to me it would be far simpler just to have a Pentuim-class machine in each room (you can get them quite small for embedded applications). If you're going to have a display in each room anyways, why not just have that box play the actual mp3s? (One sound card in each machine, far less hassle than 6 in one.
Instead of running speaker and control wire back and forth for every room, each room would be its own stand-alone player. Then you could simply link each to a central fileserver that has all the mp3s on an NFS share. Presumably you'd want to run Cat5 to each room anyways. Just seems like a far more prudent plan to me.
Who are you kidding? you're on a linux site, you're just trolling for some karma/recognition.
I'll answer all of your questions, even though I know it's not the answers you want to hear:
My winamp uses up 2 percent of CPU on a dual 450 PIII with a memory footprint of 8 megs. That means you could have say, 50 different streams with my system. Or get 6 streams with about 100 Mhz chip (to be conservative). A low end PIII will do the job is your answer.
it can be remotely controlled via many things, IR ports, LCDs with touch screens, your cell phone, a wireless PDA... your imagination is the limit.
and the kicker: Windows NT/2k/XP can handle it. Just like any other of the current OSs would. You just launch as many winamps as you want, configure them to use a specific sound card, and voila.
*yawn*
shouldn't (now that we're in the 21st century and all) this be doable without 'pulling some massive amount of cables in the walls'?
FM broadcast .. ok thats 2 words..
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