I am not looking for very high quality music.

I am only looking for some back ground music at low volume at each room.

I have a wifi laptop in each room hooked up to some speaker.

Music source is MP3 or APE.

Currently, all laptop are able to play the same music from one file server with out the problem.

The problem is synchronizing them to start at the exact same time.

I am only looking for a software solution, not a hardware solution.

The music only to be controlled from server, I will just adjust each rooms speaker by volume.

Let me know if such software exist, I search the forum first, but did not find anything.

If I were doing this, I would run a Shoutcast server and Winamp on each one of the clients.

http://www.shoutcast.com/download

If I were doing this, I would run a Shoutcast server and Winamp on each one of the clients.

http://www.shoutcast.com/download

Which will never be synchronized.

Simple answer is, if you want synchronized music, you must go with a hardware solution. PC/Mac soundcards are never going to sync. Period.

Which will never be synchronized.

Simple answer is, if you want synchronized music, you must go with a hardware solution. PC/Mac soundcards are never going to sync. Period.

Yay we agree on something!

OP - the problem is that the vast majority of sound cards out there do not supply the necessary feedback to ensure that bits are being decoded when the computer thinks they are, this prevents the software packages from talking and syncing.

I am not looking for very high quality music.

I am only looking for some back ground music at low volume at each room.

I have a wifi laptop in each room hooked up to some speaker.

Music source is MP3 or APE.

Currently, all laptop are able to play the same music from one file server with out the problem.

The problem is synchronizing them to start at the exact same time.

I am only looking for a software solution, not a hardware solution.

The music only to be controlled from server, I will just adjust each rooms speaker by volume.

Let me know if such software exist, I search the forum first, but did not find anything.


Cheapest and simple solution for this is airport expresses from apple.

They can be had for under $80 street and sync beautifully in my 4 zone system. control with PC Itunes, Apple Itouch/Iphone. Very cheap and good quality system. each airport has optical and analog out. They can be used wirelessly or via ethernet.

I also have a 2 zone sonos duet, 11 xboxes, 2 PS3's and a Popcorn Hour between my 2 houses and each has its purpose and place but for inexpensive you can't beat a airport express/itunes combo for price....

in this scenario you need only 1 laptop

EDIT: Sorry I did not realize you are looking for a SW solution. as far as I know it does not exist

Sean

I use a single RCA Lyra Wireless RD900W transmitter driven by mpd (Music Player Daemon) on an Ubuntu Linux box.

This transmits uncompressed 44.1/48 KHz 16-bit stereo over a digital 900 MHz connection to multiple Lyra Wireless receivers, into which I've plugged decent quality powered speakers.

This is a very cheap way to go if you don't need a "now playing" display in each room. The sound quality is very good and is perfectly in sync.

mpd is just a backend jukebox server process. There are a ton of clients available for all sorts of platforms.

The Lyra Wireless system cost about $25 at buy.com 2-3 years ago. It's been discontinued but still shows up online occasionally. It works fine with XP, Mac OS and Linux but is not compatible with Vista or Windows 7. (I fixed that by writing a KMDF USB filter driver to patch some broken descriptors that were tripping up Microsoft's usbaudio.sys.) The transmitter attaches to a USB port and shows up as a USB sound device (it doesn't use the computer's own soundcard). The transmitted audio remains in digital format until it hits the DACs in the receivers. What's especially nice is that this system doesn't consume any bandwidth on the WiFi network since it's totally separate.