How to broadcast audio over network so all computers are synced?

[niels_olson]

Anyone who grew up in the age of radio and had the kitchen and bedroom radios tuned to the same channel knows what I want to do.

I want to have a master broadcast computer and then be able to go from room to room and choose whether or not to put the computer in that room is playing that master channel. So then I could walk around the house and here the same music. Can the broadcast channel be used? I feel like this should be a solved problem, but Google is rather unrevealing.

[th0ma5]

Several ways to do this. On Ubuntu, one could use PulseAudio's networked audio. You could tune your source with instance of VLC, streaming at a port, and tune other VLC instances on the network to that port. On windows you could run a Shoutcast server, even recording from line in or the master audio (depending on soundcard drivers) and tune that in with your favorite audio program on other machines. There are really quite a few programs that do audio streaming and tune in audio streaming. Most any way that I can think of digitally will cause audio delay, because computers simply don't have the timing.

[tewks]

I'm not sure what your opinion of iTunes is, but,

Apple's Airtunes works really well. Plug in speakers/receiver/whatever (either analog or SPDIF) into each Airport Express. In iTunes, check each Airport you want to play through, and away you go. The audio sync is good. The Remote app for iPhone/touch works nicely with this kind of setup.

Another option, which I think is more expensive and difficult, is Sonos.