5.1 Sound Card Delivers 3 Streams of iTunes

An anonymous reader writes "How do you distribute simultaneous streams of DRM-protected iTunes from a single computer to multiple rooms of the house? Autonomic Controls demonstrated a unique solution at the recent Electronic House Expo (EHX). The company's Media Control Server EX software turns a PC with a 5.1 sound card into a three-zone music distribution server. (Add a second card for six outputs). At EHX, the solution was demonstrated with a multiroom audio system from NuVo, whose keypads could be used to browse and select songs, playlists, genres, artists, etc. The Autonomic software merges WMA and iTunes files into a single library for easy access." I have mixed feelings about this: on one hand, this is a really clever idea and a cool hack. On the other hand, the fact that DRM makes something like this necessary is truly infuriating.

Comments

Tech just isn't here yet...

[FredFredrickson]

I'm still waiting for a good solution to provide audio throughout my house.

I've always loved the fact that through Yahoo Music (or Rhapsody) you can access any music you'd like via subscription. Greatest Party Toy ever!

I've purchased many toys to try to accomplish bringing this to my livingroom, and my results have been varied. I purchased the D-Link DSM320 Media Lounge. This wireless player hooked up to a UPNP server on my computer and played music (and video) in my livingroom, with TV-Remote browsing. The problem: It only integrated with my personal library. No full 2-million track searching. This of course was a problem, because at parties, I want people to take full advantage of the 2 million tracks available (and I don't want to add justin timberlake to my personal library, just because people at a party want to hear him).

I've tried a sansa connect (mp3 player). This was the best solution yet, although it was a small mp3 player, it connects via wireless network and allows the full catalog search. Yahoo Music has just announced they're closing and the Sansa Connect no longer will offer this functionality.

I've tried Napster's Media Center Plugin- but it crashes regularly.

I know that Tivo now offers functionality with Rhapsody- but I don't have cable, and I don't want to pay Tivo's subscription (not to mention high price for hardware I won't use).

And of course there's Sonos- which has EXACTLY what I want, for about 4 times a reasonable price.

I've chronicaled my adventures for anybody looking to learn from my mistakes: Digital Wireless Audio Age , and my review of the DSM-320 and 520.

I thought fairplay allowed you to register up to 5

[plasmacutter]

As much as I hate DRM, it's presence in this case does not "necessitate" this application in any way.

Fairplay allows up to 5 computers to share the same account key. As for larger households, well you asked for headaches anyway if you as parents have more than 4 kids who are the age most really get into music. I doubt you'll even notice one more.

So it's not about DRM created necessity, it's about enabling an alternative to duplicating a library up to 5 times and paying for up to 5 times the storage and 5 times the power to keep that storage active. I personally am happy this choice is open to consumers.

Doesn't everyone have a whole-house audio system?

[lancejjj]

How do you distribute simultaneous streams of DRM-protected iTunes from a single computer to multiple rooms of the house? Would I really want three streams of centrally controlled audio from MY single 1U rack mount server with a single sound card coupled with a whole-house audio distribution system?

Installing the analog wiring in all my rooms would cost me thousands of dollars. This seems like a very expensive solution to a problem that doesn't impact most people. It might make sense if you run a museum or something, with independent audio pumped into each room - but that's it. And it seems quite fragile to run - too many parts.

Single Sound Card Multizone?

[Zackbass]

I'm quite sure it isn't a novel idea but I haven't seen much info about it on the internets. A few of my friends and I got together last year to set up a similar system where we live. We use a plain old Soundblaster Live! Value card hooked up to four different zones (bathrooms). It's connected through a network drive to our music server and has a simple web interface to control the music in each zone. The web interface just controls four different instances of mplayer with the appropriate flags for rerouting the audio to the single channels. I'm sure the sound quality isn't great, but it's perfect if you like to air guitar with Dragonforce in the shower.

We'll probably write up a guide on how to do it if we ever get slightly less lazy. It's really simple if you don't get hung up by Linux's sound support. But yeah, lazy.

Re:Simple

[mcpkaaos]

iTunes DRM doesn't stop you playing your music on multiple devices. iTunes DRM stops your from playing your music on more than five computers. Once you hit that limit, you better hope you have access to the other machines to de-authorize them, otherwise you are stuck with resetting your auth completely (which you can only do once per year, if I remember correctly). This has bitten me more than once.

You could burn a CD using either and use the CD player you already have. I don't want to burn a CD every time I buy something from iTunes just so I can listen to it on the way to work. It's annoying, cumbersome, and incredibly wasteful. Besides, if I'm going to burn music to a CD, I'm going to burn the MP3 and fit 10x the music on there (there are plenty of modern CD players that can handle this).

iTunes reasonably permissive DRM doesn't present a very big hurdle I suffered iTunes for quite a while, hoping to figure out an easy way to deal with their DRM (like monitoring the directory I download the songs to and have QTFU automatically strip the DRM for me in a script). It worked, but it was a pain in the ass to manage and really didn't scale all that well with a huge library. Then I thought, "Why the hell am I jumping through all these hoops just so I can listen to music that I already paid for?"

I am with the parent poster. Screw iTunes.