Redirecting Audio from PC to PC?

Posted by Cliff on Wednesday January 11, 2006 @12:55PM from the network-sound-for-windows dept.

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?"

1 of 76 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Too bad MPDv2 isn't out yet by neocephas · 2006-01-11 16:01 · Score: 3, Interesting

I usually use MPD (Music Player Daemon) on my Linux and NetBSD boxes so I can play audio remotely (or locally too). MPDv2 is suppose to support Windows, but it isn't out yet. Another trick that I've used for Linux/BSD -> Windows is that I ran a esound server (esd -public -tcp -port 6666) on the Windows computer and used mplayer (mplayer -ao esd) to send the audio output to the remote windows computer. It's very fun to send Avril Lavigne songs to the university's clusters' computers to piss off your hard working friends :).

Anyway, a quick google came up with PlayerPal, which runs on Windows and seems to be what you want. In fact, it seems to do a lot of things that MPD and its various clients do. Good luck.