Multi-Room Wireless Sound System?

abrinton asks: "I just went into escrow on a new house. Of course, first thoughts are to the sound system. I don't want to wire. Anything. I've got a wireless network, so computers are all sorted. But what do I do for sound? I need ideas for a centrally controlled sound system that can use 802.11g for transport. I'd like to have the same music everywhere, or better still, options to play different things in different rooms. I've got access to tons of old PIII laptops, wireless gear, old computers, sound cards, etc to make this work. Has anyone got any ideas or done anything like this?"

Comments

iTunes

[BWJones]

I am sure someone else will mention it, but I use iTunes exclusively for music throughout our home. A central server with our entire 10k song plus collection ripped onto it resides in the study with an old Powerbook connected up to the main stereo system in the house that spins out the tunes for most to hear (A Mac Mini would be perfect for this task). Others who want to listen to something else in differing parts of the house (or outside) can also tie into iTunes and listen simultaneously to completely independent streams, all wirelessly. In fact, before they moved, my next door neighbors used to stream from our server as well.

I don't know if PIII laptops can run iTunes or not, but my six year old Powerbook spins tunes with no problem whatsoever. For those truly particular about their music ( or those with high end home stereo systems possessing digital audio connectors ), Powermac G5's and the new 17in Powerbook also have digital audio out. Combine that with Apple's lossless audio format and you have some kick ass tunage available without ever again having to search through your CD collection for that particular song. A cheaper option is to purchase Airport Express units for differing parts of your house that each have an audio out and can plug into any available power socket.

Re:iTunes

[over_exposed]

Right on - and a PIII should have no problems running iTunes. I would highly recommend this setup. It worked great for me for two years - although my setup isn't as elaborate as yours sounds like it may be. Just make sure to A) Secure your wireless network then B) make sure Remote Desktop or a VNC solution are enabled on all of the machines. That way you can either pick the music you want to play in that room FROM that room, or you can connect remotely and make changes that way.

Re:iTunes

[TheRaven64]

Your system (as you described it) lacks two things:

1. A `push' capability - i.e. the ability to select the music being played in a different room, and
2. The ability to synchronise the music in multiple locations.

Apple could add both of these very easily with two modifications to iTunes. The first would allow a computer running iTunes to be set as a slave - the machine would appear as an Airport Express station to other instances of iTunes on the local network. The second would allow you to send a stream to multiple locations (Airport Express nodes, slaved iTunes clients and your own speakers). I honestly don't know why these features aren't in iTunes already.

Re:iTunes

[redheadedokie]

Yep. I had pretty much the same setup in my old house. My G4 lived in my bedroom and we had a PowerBook G3/500 hooked up to the stereo and tv. Sharing MP3's wirelessly with iTunes worked flawlessly. We also used the PowerBook to watch downloaded TV shows (BBC stuff not availabled in the US). It'd stream most formats (Divx, Xvid, etc) wirelessly from the G4...but higher bitrates needed to be copied over first. Everything looked fantastic when connected via S-Video. Also, the only real limitation to the AirPort Express is that they will only play what's playing on the main iTunes "server"--i.e. no different songs in different rooms. Another cool thing that you might consider is to have a BlueTooth cell phone. I never got around t to it, but there is some software called Salling Clicker that'll let you control iTunes (skip songs and stuff) from your cell phone. Here's the link (too lazy to do HTML at the moment) http://homepage.mac.com/jonassalling/Shareware/Cli cker/

Re:iTunes

[mr i want to go home]

iTunes has both these capabilities.

1. Requires airport express. You name the Airport Express(es) as "Living Room", "Kitchen", etc. You can then select these from any wi-fi Mac and stream to each one (ie - push). Airport Express has digital audio-out, BTW.

2. You only need one central music library really. You then share that library with iTunes. Any other copies of iTunes on the network (Mac or PC) can the see that library and any playlists on it, and play music from it. I haven't noticed any lag when playing music shared this way, even over wireless networks even with 3 or 4 people sharing.

If you require true synchronisation of multiple libraries, then a little rsync is your friend. Here's the options I use to keep my 2 libraries in sync (note: I only add music on one machine, so this is a one way sync) - I'm not sure what Slashcode will do to the following, so you may have to remove spaces...

rsync -v -r -C --ignore-existing --rsh="ssh" /users/my_local_account/music/itunes me@myserver_name_or_ip_address:/users/my_account_o n_the_server/music/

The one thing that iTunes lacks that annoys me is the ability to remotely control another copy of iTunes (like on the server) from my laptop. I actually have a script to do this through the shell, but I'd really like to be doing it through the iTunes interface.

Re:iTunes

[Phrack]

Doing iTunes sharing from a central Linux box:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=200 30 711140157143

Old article, but it'll be a step in a particular direction should someone be looking for that.

No, it's not a player.. it's just a repository that looks like a shared iTunes to other clients.

Re:Hmmm, go wired!

[pdbogen]

I'm going to have to agree. Wireless is all well and good, but don't use it if you don't bloody have to. Wireless is for laptops, so you can walk around with internet. Are you going to wander around with a speaker in your hand? Anyway, I can't see a hacked-together wireless sound solution with P3 laptops and whatnot being nearly as good as a few well-placed wired speakers.

Sonos might be your answer...

[klubar]

You might look into the Sonos system (previously discussed on /. It's wireless and allows unique content at each location. I saw an early demo and it was very impressive. Cost might be a factor, but the system and controllers have a very nice look and feel.

sound in all your rooms

[sidhe7]

I've been playing with this problem for a couple of years now. The problem is that sound streaming over IP is basically impossible to sync properly. As mentioned above, it's pretty simple to stream different streams to each room but if you want all the rooms playing the same thing, each will be off by a few parts of a second. It drove me crazy. We just ran audio over Cat5e everywhere from a central system in the living room. Home Depot's got punch down blocks that convert Cat5e into an unamplified audio output RCA jack.

Wireless audio distribution

[jnolen]

So it turns out that this is harder that you might think. Getting different wireless audio into different rooms isn't too bad. It's mostly a function of throughput. But getting the SAME wireless audio is into different rooms and keeping it in sync is a surprisingly difficult.

I have the SlimDevices Squeezebox (http://www.slimdevices.com/), and it works great at the first task, but only moderately well at the second. There's a new company called Sonos (http://www.sonos.com/) that just released their product which does both very well.

I had a chance to beta-test the product and it really is as good as described. It's Linux-based, but not open-source. It utilizes a proprietary mesh-network running on top of 802.11g and it worked flawlessly in my three zone setup. All three zones could play high-bitrate audio in perfect sync with no drops.

The downside is that it is fairly expensive. If you don't need sync'd audio, I might go with a cheaper option. But if you do, I've yet to find anything that can top Sonos.

Re:Hmmm, go wired!

[fishbowl]

"You had me all the way up to Monster Cable. [Shudder] You're falling for a lot of marketing hype."

ABX testing has shown Home Depot 18 gauge lamp cord to be identical or even superior to Monster Cable in all respects.

Re:Monster Cable

[futuresheep]

Here comes the flame war about cabling, but you'll get the same sound quality by wiring your house with lamp cord as you will with Monster Cable. Monster is an outstanding marketing machine. The product are good quality, but the bang for buck ratio is pretty bad.

If you don't want to belive me, and since I'm just some schmo on the internet you shouldn't, do a search on Monster Cable at either of these websites, and read the consensus opinions.

Avs Forum
HDTVoice

If you're looking for high quality cables at an excellent price, try Bluejeans Cable

MythTV

[Mike Miller]

While the entire app is a bit overkill, using mythtv would be a reasonable solution. For just Music, you would need to run a backend server with the music and NFS and then just install the clients on your laptops. There's also a Knoppix distro for it - http://mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html

There are several websites on converting laptops into "picture frames" http://www.likelysoft.com/hacks/pictureframes.shtm l, http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/27/023922 2&tid=222&tid=1, http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel 9.JunktopRevival Which you could modify slightly to add built in powered speakers and hang one in each room.

- Mike

Really simple, here's how:

[cypherz]

If you have a network, and a stack 'o PIII's then you have what you need. It doesn't really matter what kind of network, as long as everything connects via TCP and has enough bandwidth for your needs.
Setup a linux server, with enough disk space for your media collection and whatever else you want to store there. Install gnumpd3 from
here: http://www.gnu.org/software/gnump3d/
Install a desktop linux distro on the machines in each room. Aim a web browser from any machine at the URL of the gnump3d server and viola! you have music from your collection on demand in any room!
Streaming radio style music is easy as well. Install icecast from here:http://www.icecast.org/
and aim the xmms player from here: http://www.xmms.org/ and you have streaming media! woohoo!
If you want to control a distribution system that plays the same songs things get more complicated, you'll need Apple computer's RTSP server and some client software to get everything sync'd throughout the house.
I use secure shell from my zaurus wireless pda and mpg123 and aumix to operate this from a pocket sized device. For everything else I just browse the music library with gnump3d's web interface. FWIW, I use SuSE linux. It came with all the above except for the Darwin Stream Server (or whatever it is that Apple calls it these days). I had to download and compile the icecast source, but what the heck, it wasn't to hard to do either.

HTH

Re:Hmmm, go wired!

[Anonymous Coward]

Professional "golden ears" refuse to submit to blind tests. However, some tests using a placebo cable while the real cable was hidden showed that the "golden ears" consistently claim to hear what the marketing information for the cable they think they are testing says they should hear. When the placebos are swapped and the actual cable being used is left fixed they consistently pick the best looking placebo.

http://home.austin.rr.com/tnulla/duncable.htm

Re:Hmmm, go wired!

[eggoeater]

I use to run a pro-sound company (we ran big sound systems for bands and DJs). Every now-and-then I'd get to a gig and find out I was missing a speaker cable or not have a long enough speaker cable to get to the speakers they owner wanted outside on the deck,etc.

Whenever that happened I just ran to the nearest Lowe's or WalMart and bought two 16 gauge extension cords, chop off the ends and put Neutrik speaker connectors on it. Worked great and got a 100ft speaker cable for 8 dollars. You actually don't need more than 16 guage unless you're pushing serious wattage (>150 RMS).
Of course for any install job I would use 14 and 12 guage.