Slashdot Mirror
Redirecting Audio from PC to PC?
Atlantis-Rising asks: "I have two PCs in my standard setup- one is a 1U server (Running windows XP), and the other is a Windows XP Media Center PC. When I purchased the server, I didn't think I'd need a soundcard, and so I made no provisions for this when I was planning my system, and so it has no audio. After buying the server, my main desktop died and I decided to use the server as my main desktop machine, and I'd really like audio. However, my Media Center PC is hooked up to a wonderful speaker set, one that I'd not like to duplicate. I therefore wonder if anyone on Slashdot knows of a way to play the audio from one PC on another? I know about buying a USB sound-card, and I'd rather not do that. I also know that I can use RDP to connect the media center PC to the server, but I'd rather not do that either, for graphical performance reasons. Are there any other solutions out there, Slashdot?"
Netcat can do wonderful things that should never be done over a network.
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
You should give esound a try.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
Just get the Windows Media Encoder 9 Series and you can broadcast the streaming media over the networkr ies/encoder/default.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/9se
Maybe VLC will do what you want.
This will work fine... Since you don't have a sound card you will need a virtual soundcard http://www.ntonyx.com/vac.htm works great. Then you set up a shoutcast server http://shoutcast.com/ and a copy of winamp with the shoutcast dsp encoder. once you get shoutcast running and broadcasting over your network you just tell it to take it's input from the virtual audio cable. You need to fiddle with the windows mixers to get all the sounds sent out the vac. on the speaker machine tune into your stream with winamp and that should be all you need to do. Use a low bit rate so the encoder doesn't tax your CPU. I recommend the aac+ @24k. This sounds great and won't tax your cpu much at all. good luck! -DJTempest>
It would be quite easy to achieve what you want on linux, thanks to various sound drivers that are designed to allow streaming to another computer.
On Windows however, the sound drivers are discouraged from doing things like that. In fact, some applications will refuse to output sound if the driver isn't "approved" by Microsof, pretty much specifically to block this kind of setup.
Still, if someone was buy the DDK and write an unsigned virtual sound driver for windows, most applications out there would accept it for now (except for DRM-enabled things.)
for my own situation, i have two machines side-by-side. one is a rackmount linux server and one is a windows game-playing machine (also using a monitor switch to dual-monitor the windows box). if both sound-cards use spdif connexions, then i highly recommend taking the spdif-out from one box and wiring it to the spdif-in on the sound card that has the speakers. alternately, if you have sound cards that only have one-eigth inch headphone jacks, take the line-out from one and get a patch cable to the line-in or mic jack on the other.
if you patch it in through a mic jack, make sure you turn off the decibel boost on the mic jack or otherwise you'll get hideous distortion. if you're running it to the line-in, then go into the mixer and set line-in between half and three-quarter volume at first. then adjust the line-out on the slave machine up to it's highest and see where you're at.
in my case, i seldom use the server for full audio or video playback (but will occasionally), so i tend to leave the line-in closer to halfway because i mostly want to hear the sound events from the server, but have the option to use it to watch a movie while i play a game.