So I've been looking around for a piece of software, and haven't yet been able to find it. Thought maybe someone here might have a lead, so....

What I'm looking for is a way to stream music across my (small) network, such that where ever it is playing it is in sync. A specific example: If I am playing music downstairs on the computer, I want to be able to walk upstairs and hear the same thing playing from the home theater PC, or to wander around with my laptop using 802.11b, listening to music, and have the same thing playing elsewhere in the house. The key here is it should sound seamless, that is I should not be able to tell that a different machine is playing the music.
Problem with everything I've tried to date is a local buffer: you can get close to the above, but the local buffer to handle the stream means a slight timing difference in the playback.
This seems a much better solution than running wire about my house for speaker cable
I'm not picky about what OS is required, nor what codec is supported, though I would prefer an open source solution.
Of course, the ultimate solution would be streaming from the empeg, but that might be asking a bit much.
If no such solution exists, maybe I'll just tackle the problem myself!

Obviously, the sync problem is the biggest one.

I'd try getting a copy of Real's streaming server and see if you can set it up in multicast or broadcast mode. There's a free version. You might be able to do the same sort of thing with Apple's streaming server. I think that your best bet for synchronicity is in multicast/broadcast delivery, though.

If that doesn't work, I imagine that it's all a client issue. You could try writing your own small audio client that doesn't try to buffer, and that might help.

Putting aside the buffer/delay issue (even radio stations have some delay), i've always used Nullsoft's Shoucast server which runs great on both Windows and *nix platforms.

The reason I didn't suggest that is that I'm not sure that it'll do broadcast/multicast streaming, which I'd go so far as to say would be a requirement for synchronized playback. At least enough to look at the servers that will do it first.

Not sure what you mean by broadcast streaming. What I do is run the daemon on the server and feed it with music using either an mp3 player on the server itself or winamp running on a desktop. Then it is playing the whole playlist constantly until it ends or I stop it or I can have it on repeat to never stop. Then I just use any mp3 player on any machine on the network and listen to the broadcasted stream playing from it.
The music does not start over or change songs when connecting to it from different clients, it just keeps playing weather your listening or not.
Shoutcast also allows you to play individual songs on the fly but I haven't played with that feature much to know enough about it.

Yes, but you have one TCP connection for each client. If the server is broadcasting the audio data, I feel that there is a better chance of synchronization. Not that I have any experience in practice.

And by broadcast, I mean making the destination of the IP packets be the broadcast address for the network. Multicast is similar but different, and probably wouldn't make any difference in this case. It's effectively impossible to do broadcasts over TCP, so UDP or some other protocol would be required, and I know that DSS and RealServer support doing that. I'm pretty sure that Icecast/Shoutcast doesn't.

Someone I used to know wrote a large chunk of icecast, which is an open source alternative to shoutcast. I would think your best bet for synchronising them is to make sure all your clients have exactly the same settings... Manualy set the connection speed and buffer size, and don't let it automaticaly pick something else. There was a good article on slashdot about Disney doing the same thing at one of their new theme parks, but I suspect their solution might be overkill. (might have been Wired magazine, or both...)

Matthew

The article you are remembering is:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/04/04/1814224&mode=thread&tid=137
This is what got me thinking about the problem long ago. I've not got gigabit ethernet, nor that kind of money to sink in to the problem. I don't really care if it's uncompressed, either.
However, I am begining to think this is something that would have to be created from scratch. If anyone else has any thoughts, let us know. Otherwise I will post something with what I find.

This may be along the lines of what you're talking about. I've not tried it. Winamp2 plugin:
http://classic.winamp.com/plugins/detail.jhtml;$sessionid$ZMVWR3S14LC5C5YAAAARCZI?componentId=8779

The right answer might be RTSP, but I don't know if anything supports it yet.

Individual TCP connections won't guarantee that all of the streams are perfectly synchronised. As Bitt says, broadcast/multicast would be a better way to keep the clients in sync -- since there's only a single stream. Of course, you may not care that much -- a 100-200ms difference may be fine for some purposes.

That's it! That's what I've been looking for. I'll let you know how it works. Now to feed it from the empeg....

Damnit, I want this for xmms.

Someone I used to know wrote a large chunk of icecast,
Jack?

Jack?
Nope, Barath. I went to high school with him, then a few years of college. I don't think he's too involved with icecast at the moment.

Matthew