The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

Virtual audio output -> TCP

I had an interesting need today and was curious if anyone has faced the same requirement, and if so if you found a solution.

In a nutshell - a low impact, virtual audio output for "mouthless" PCs that transmits the audio, with full unprocessed quality, as a UDP broadcast or TCP stream. Thus if I played a song in winamp on such a soundcard-less PC, I could then connection/listen to the UDP broadcasts on another PC.

Longer version - I have two PCs right beside each other, both with their own monitors, one a staging test box, and the other a development box. The development box happens to have fairly modern hardware, so every now and then I enjoy an online game (today it was "America's Army", as unnerving as the whole origin of that game is). "Let's make this semi productive," think I. "I'll run an MSDN show on the other box so I would watch it during lulls, and subconsciously otherwise". I copy over the downloaded files and hit play. No sound - plan foiled! Even though my other PC is multiheaded, playing a WM9 stream can be highly resource intensive and I don't want my fragging upset by it, and anyways here I have another fully capable PC raring to go. So here's what I thought I'd do - with such an output device previously mentioned (virtual soundcard), I would play the MSDN Show on that PC, broadcasting its audio to my dev/gaming box where the extremely low resource utilization capture would then merge it into the output stream.

Long story short (well too late for that now), I can't find such a tool (that operates on a soundcardless PC, does no unnecessary encoding of the audio, and transmits it to another PC). I grabbed the DDK and there is a virtual audio driver, though trying to broadcast the data over the network would require a user mode component significantly increasing the compexity. Should I look into DirectSound interceptions?

Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks

.
Sunday, May 16, 2004

There isn't anything unnerving about the origins of America's Army.

It's a recruiting tool, and relatively inexpensively developed to boot.

It was a good idea, and better than simply having recruiters hound kids to join up.

Go Army!

Ankur
Monday, May 17, 2004

Check out the Remote Desktop Protocol for Win2K3 & WinXP. Both support audio redirection. I think it is RDP 5. RDesktop is an open source implementation. I do not know if it supports RDP 5 yet.

Have TS Server running with audio redirection switched on, on one. Launch the audio app. Log on that box from the other with a TS Client. Enjoy.

KayJay
Monday, May 17, 2004

Something like that exists in the world of the X Window System: the Network Audio System ( http://radscan.com/nas.html ). They seem to have binaries for Windows too though, via Cygwin. Might be worth it to check it out.

vrt3
Monday, May 17, 2004