Looking for the best "Whole house audio" media server setup, for cheap :)

[WarDemon666]

Hey guys,

I've been searching for the past few days, I am trying to find a way of getting music from a central place in my house, to everywhere else in the house... for example... Having an FM transmitter on a PC, and a fm radio in each room would give the effect I am looking for. I would like a server somewhere, and the ability to all clients to 'listen' to that music.

The catch:

You have to be able to change the audio from any of the clients.

There has to be some software out there that could do this.. I found a particular piece of software, made by logitech, which is almost exaclty what I need.

http://www.slimdevices.com/

There are also hardware boxes that you can buy, but they also have a software only solution. It's called "SqueezeCenter" (the server) and "SqueezePlay" / "SoftSqueeze" (the client).

This software is great, only problem is that it is slow, buggy, and I couldn't figure out a way of having an Xbox 360 connect to it :-( (didn't try to long because I realized how buggy it was)

http://video.google.com/videop...id=2176025602905109829

Here is another solution, but I'm not ready to start with linux, I would rather a windows XP based solution as this is the OS all my computers are running, but something like this is exactly what I am looking for

If anyone has any suggestions on where to look, or have anything like this set up in their own home, let me know!!

Take care!

 

[vshah]

not sure about controlling playback, but you can use winamp running shoucast source + shoutcast DNAS to stream whatever the main PC is playing to every other computer in the house. if you set the audio input to "soundcard input" you can just run winamp in the background, and use some other program/audio player to handle the playback and client control part

edit: check out http://www.twonkyvision.de/learn.html

not free though

 

[WarDemon666]

Originally posted by: vshah
not sure about controlling playback, but you can use winamp running shoucast source + shoutcast DNAS to stream whatever the main PC is playing to every other computer in the house. if you set the audio input to "soundcard input" you can just run winamp in the background, and use some other program/audio player to handle the playback and client control part

edit: check out http://www.twonkyvision.de/learn.html

not free though

Twonky looks interesting..... and they also have a free trial! I'll check them out, thanks for the suggestion!

I have thought of winamp, but doesn't really feel like a stable / long term solution.... And i'm not sure if it would support x360 unless there's some plugins for that...


I'll test drive Twonky and see how that goes, if anyone else has any suggestions please let me know!

Thanks!