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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).
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.)
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.