Playing all sound remotely via LAN

[pindab0ter]

Hey, I wondered if I could play all sounds that my MacBook Pro makes, via some sort of remote drivers or something, on my XP computer, that's hooked up with my 5.1 system.

 

[larkost]

There was an initiative to get audio on networks, I am forgetting what the standard was called. But as far as I can tell it fizzled due to the heavy problems of latency over networks. You have to buffer everything to keep it from pausing in the middle, and that makes it useless for anything that has to be timed with something on-screen. So you are not going to be able to use anything like this for anything other than background music. And if you are thinking games: that it right out.

 

[pindab0ter]

There was an initiative to get audio on networks, I am forgetting what the standard was called. But as far as I can tell it fizzled due to the heavy problems of latency over networks. You have to buffer everything to keep it from pausing in the middle, and that makes it useless for anything that has to be timed with something on-screen. So you are not going to be able to use anything like this for anything other than background music. And if you are thinking games: that it right out.

... Is there any other way to (while preserving quality) link my Mac's sound to my other PC? I mean, I don't mind remote controlling some settings via VNC, but I want the sound to come from my MacBook. Can it be done via firewire or something like that?

 

[Okes]

Hi, I think this software might do the trick.

Airfoil

I haven't used for transfering sound from one computer to another, but using it to transfer music to multiple airport express work great, so I would imagine it should work. They use to have a trial version too, not sure if they still do.

 

[pindab0ter]

Hey, thanks for the tip! I tried out Airfoil and at first glance, it's a very mature and well-made app. But then I encountered some problems. At first, as stated before, there's the latency, almost so high I could count it. I really wonder why this is, because Airport doesn't have any latencyproblems whatsoever (for as far as I can recall).

Then the second problem is sound quality. If I play a song on my MBP and transfer it to my Windows XP system to play it on my 5.1 set, it sounds very flattened, something even a lot of EQing didn't resolve. I played the same song on Winamp on my XP system and it sounded like I had an entire new set of speakers, it sounded great (at least in comparison, hehe).
I think this has to do with compression and bandwidth, but that's just what I think.

Anyone have any ideas/solutions?