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Playing the same mp3 on multiple computers at once.

J

JonathanYoung

Senior member
I have computers in every room of the house, and I'd like to be able to use them like a giant stereo, i.e. play a song on one computer and have each computer play it back at the same time... is this possible? If so, how? They're connected with 100mbps connections. Thanks!

Edit: Very funny, Nothingman!
 
Edit: Very funny, Nothingman!
Click to expand...

It wasn't a joke. At the lowest level all you have to do is share the directory and have them all play the file with something like WinAMP. If exact synchronization is important, then you probably want to setup something like icecast and have WinAMP play that instead of the song directly.
 
THe only streaming server I have any experience with is the Windows one. I had Server->Switch->Switch->Switch->machine, only the end swtich was different on the machines. They were out of sync by anywhere from quarter/half a second to 2 seconds. YMMV, check Icecast, it may work better then the MS implementation.
 
I've had great success with multicast audio and video with the windows media server as well. As far as getting out of sync we found that it had to do with the PC hardware. Network wise it was getting delivered precisely at the same time down to the millisecond.
 
could have been PCwise, don't remember what we were playing it on. I thought (my memory may be failing me) that it was the same box (in the test lab). All Compaq EN 866 w/ same proc/mem/sound/video/nic. Could have been mediaplayer though.
 
Thanks for the replies, guys. I tried shoutcast and there was noticeable lag. I'll give VideoLAN and icecast a try as well. Nothinman, I've tried the method you suggested before, but it's a pain in the butt (damn near impossible) to sync 5 computers at once. It sounds like trying to play music in a cave with all the echoing. Thanks again!
 
There are plugins for winamp to sync playing over tcp/ip. There were at least a dozen of around on winamps plugin site back before AOL bought them (version 2.5?) Some of them required tweaking to the way winamp buffers songs to memory and some didn't. You are almost certainly going to need local copies of each song to be sync'd at each player because the buffering will desync them.
 
try using NetSync and using a winamp decoder that allows you to shorten or turn off buffering. The directsound decoder used to let you do this I think. Sorry I havn't used winamp in a while and it looks like noone has made a plugin for 5.x for this yet.
 
Originally posted by: JonathanYoung
Thanks for the replies, guys. I tried shoutcast and there was noticeable lag. I'll give VideoLAN and icecast a try as well. Nothinman, I've tried the method you suggested before, but it's a pain in the butt (damn near impossible) to sync 5 computers at once. It sounds like trying to play music in a cave with all the echoing. Thanks again!
Click to expand...
It's easy with VideoLAN. I've had movies, music, etc. perfectly synced on 5+ boxes at LAN parties before.

Just run VLC -> open MP3s -> stream output to UDP 224.0.0.1:1234 (don't play locally)

On clients: run VLC -> open network stream -> UDP 224.0.0.1:1234

Edit:

Keep in mind you'll need to run two instances of VLC on the box that's serving (server/client).
 
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