Hi All,

i've just started looking at whole house audio systems, but still have a lot to learn. I've spent a little time trawling through this forum, but couldn't find what I was after, apologies if this is a FAQ.

I have a fairly extensive LAN (both wired and wireless) in my home, with PC's in most rooms, and most of them hooked up to external amps and speakers. The problem is that they all act independently, and now I want them to work together, so that I can play back music throughout the whole house, and control it from any PC in the house, or even from my wireless PDA.

I'd really like to be able to get the functionality of the Sonos system (http://www.sonos.com/products/?tref=ghome) but without all that extra hardware, i'd like to be able to do it using my existing PC media centres.

Is there any commercial, off the shelf product, that will do what I want?

Many thanks for your help, and Happy New Year!

Regards

John

Slimserver

http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_features.html

Digital network devices are notoriously difficult to get synchronized. If you ever want to have several rooms playing the same audio, and their coverage overlaps, it'll be nearly impossible to do with PC-based solutions. Analog systems do it just fine. Supposedly the Sonos units have gotten better at it too. But things like slimservers, nice as they are, won't.

Thanks for the comments guys. I've downloaded slim server, i'll post back with my results after I've tried it out.

Cheers

John

Try Xlobby. Central server running Xlobby Xnet, other computers then can be fat or thin clients. PPC can control it as well, as long as it is capable of having installed .NET Compact. You can even control it via web browser. In your case, you would use multiple fat clients. Each one would be considered a "zone".

www.xlobby.com to find out more about it.