GoneWacko’s Blog

A fun experiment

August 26, 2007 on 12:31 am | In Computing | 1 Comment
Tags: amplifier, audio, experiment, geeky, icecast, loopback

As any reader of this blog probably already knows: Yes, I’m still alive.
I’ve not blogged in a while because I just couldn’t be arsed, but today I come to you with a post about a little experiment I did.
The information below is rather geeky, perhaps, so if you’re not interested in geeky stuff, consider yourself warned and feel free not to read further

Since my last blog entry, I’ve been to Birmingham and Oxford, I’ve done more driving of cars, I’ve had LAN parties, I’ve been having a long holiday (which is unfortunately coming to an end sometime next week) and a bunch of other things. Today my parents left for Oxford to visit my sister. This means I’ve got the house to myself, which has opened up the opportunity (although really my parents wouldn’t have been in the way if I’d done it earlier).

Earlier today I was downstairs making a sandwich when, far off in the distance, I heard the sound my mIRC plays when someone says my name. This made me realize that it’d be nice if I could be notified of highlights even when I’m downstairs. Quickly a few ideas came up such as having a device which takes my PC’s sound output, broadcasts it wireless to a receiver, which then feeds the sound into the amplifier downstairs.

I don’t actually have such a device though, so I decided to try the next best thing. I looked if there were any loopback sound drivers for Windows that would allow me to take sound output and feed it back to the PC as sound input. After a bit of googling I stumbled across Virtual Audio Cable. This tool does what I want: it creates virtual sound devices which applications can send to and receive from.

Now all I needed to do was broadcast the input over the network to the PC downstairs, which is conveniently located 1 meter from the amplifier. This was easy, all I did was install Icecast and the Winamp Oddcast plugin, told Oddcast to read from the virtual input instead of Winamp’s output, and I was done.
I got the PC downstairs to connect to the Icecast server, hooked it up to the amp using a cable I happened to have in my possession already, and then I was able to enjoy sounds (and music) from my PC upstairs, downstairs!

Unfortunately the Virtual Audio Cable software does cause for a bit of lag (about one third of a second I gather), and of course Icecast streaming means the PC downstairs buffers the sound causing considerable lag.

So although it was a nice experiment, it’s not here to stay

Tomorrow I’m moving my PC downstairs to prepare for a LAN party later this week anyway, so then I can just connect my PC to the amplifier directly.