PCFormat Forum Archive

I'm trying to play music on my PC and broadcast it to other computers' speakers in the house, keeping the audio in sync. I've tried an application called Airfoil which allows streaming to multiple speakers - it's a fantastic application, but the sound quality is rubbish for music, and introduces clipping and clicks into the audio. I've also played around with the streaming functionality in VLC, but it seems incredibly unstable and works erratically at best.

Does anybody know how to stream music to multiple speakers over a LAN?

The only solutions that I'm aware of (shoutcast, icecast and their ilk) involve buffering the stream on the client end -- since you seem to want the stream in realtime, they probably aren't solutions for you. Sorry, mate.

Well actually, I can use a laptop as the source, and then just stream the music to the two PCs that I want to play the music on. As long as the buffer period is the same on both destination computers, it should be fine. I've never set up a shoutcast or icecast server before, but it's worth a try, thanks.

Use Windows Media Player 12?

Doing it with software is going to be tricky, because streaming involves the lovely internet we have in SA (My sarcasm cup runeth over)

Unfortunately, if you're streaming over the web, you're never gonna get the clients in sync with the source, since the data needs to be buffered in order to stream without dropping half the song. the time difference comes in with your upload speeds and their download speeds.

Being on LAN should eliminate the problems mentioned above since you've got an abundance of bandwidth.

I remember a friend using winamp to do his audio streams.

watching this might help you configure your stream.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... KpJ6ebqon8

then on the other machines just add the LAN iP's and ports into winamp as a stream URL and you should be good to go