In my quest for a wireless existence, I’m trying to eliminate all the cables hooked to my fancy new laptop. I’ve got the printer and ethernet figured out, but I am running into a wall over the audio.
I am running Windows 2000 Server on an old PC I built from parts, and it works well as a print and file server for the laptop. I’d like to be able to plug my Altec Lansing 2.1 speaker arrangement into the server’s sound card, and have all audio from the laptop sent to these speakers. Basically, I’d like a Windows XP driver on the laptop that sends audio over the wireless network to the server by default.
I know that this can be done using Remote Desktop, but I only have XP Home on the laptop, and can’t really afford to buy Pro just for this. Is there such a thing as a driver or software solution that can pipe everything over to the server transparently? This would include all Windows event sounds, MP3 audio, DVD audio, and everything else that makes noise on the laptop. Transparency is key, since my laptop, like your computer I’m sure, uses audio for all kinds of e-mail notifications, MSN blips and bloops and other stuff. I am running an 802.11G wireless network, so I think I’ve got plenty of bandwidth to make this happen.
Any advice?
Thanks! Incidentally, this is a fantastic forum. It reminds me of the halcyon days of the early Internet where knowledge was king and not everyone was trying to sell me something. Ah, memories.
Not quite understanding you… is it that you want to store and play the music on the server (including the physical sound output), but you want to control playback from another machine on the LAN?
If so, you could just do it with VNC - which is a bit like remote desktop - you run the VNC server application on the server (as well as your choice of media player app) and you can access and control the desktop from a VNC client, or a web browser. TightVNC is quite a good one, and is free.
Oh, wait… it actually sounds like you want the audio played on your laptop to be streamed across the the server. I’m sure I found a freeware audio streaming application when I was doing a radio project, but I can’t find it now.
Thanks for your reply. Yes, I want all sound from the laptop to be played on speakers connected to the server’s sound card. I’ve looked at a couple streaming audio solutions (Tonecast, for one), but I’m concerned about the latency between the broadcast laptop and the recipient server. TCP/IP isn’t the fastest thing in the world, and I would like to avoid having my audio way out of sync when watching movies or something like that. I haven’t actually tested a streaming solution yet, but I have my doubts.
That’s why I’m hoping that there’s a driver or other means of doing this without having to rely upon standard network protocols. Maybe I’m out to lunch.
Oh, and also – I misspoke when I said that Remote Desktop could do what I wanted. It could play the server’s audio through the laptop, but not the opposite (which is what I want).
Why would you want to do this? Streaming your laptop’s audio through your home network to your file/print server is inefficient and resource intensive, especially on your laptop which will have to be sending out continuous TCP/IP traffic to your server. In addition to using up resources on the laptop, this will have the added effect of slowing down your home network as well.
There might be a program out there that can do this but the overall negatives will far outweigh the end result.
Not to doubt you, but are you sure? It should obviously play the music, but do you think it’ll play all the Windows notifications and whatnot from the OP? To me, that sounds like the hard part.
Not to try to wee on your cornflakes - because it is an interesting situation, but wouldn’t it just be easier to run the audio to the speakers directly, using an audio cable or a wireless audio link - cutting out the server entirely?
I have a feeling that there are some KVM-over ethernet solutions out there that could be adapted to work for you, but they are probably expensive.