Use the IT as a networked soundcard

[CrashandDie]

Hi all,

Just wanted to post this, I know some of you might already be aware of it, but just for the hell of it:

If you want to use your IT as an external soundcard, over the network, this is just what you need to do:

• On the IT:
  - Get root access, either by sudo gainroot, or by SSHing into it
  - issue:

  killall esd && esd -tcp -public &

• On your computer:
  - Install eSound and the eSound clients:

  sudo apt-get install esound esound-clients

  - Instantiate esd and pipe it to your NIT:

  esd && esdmon | esdcat -s IT_IP_ADDRESS &

  (if you haven't yet done so, open /etc/hosts and add a line to resolve your NIT easily)
  - Play a sound using an esd enabled media player:

  mplayer -ao esd test.mp3

There might be a small delay, but from my (small) experience, the delay gets better after a few minutes... There have always been problems with sound over network, so yeah, you'll have to accept the small delay (or hack until you get the perfect network-delay adjustment)

Hope this helps,

Cheers

Edit: This post already referred to this technique more than a year ago.

[CrashandDie]

I've been playing a bit more with this, and this is what I've got out of it:

I use rhythmbox as my primary media player on Linux, now, with the sound exported to the IT, one could easily go as far as to think "Hey, what would happen if I X-tunnel my media player ?"

I'm running Gnome, so I click on System -> Preferences -> Sound, and instead of Autodetect, I choose ESD for sound playback. Now it's time to run rhythmbox

sudo gainroot
ssh -X user@host rhythmbox

Et voilà, you just exported your whole audio library to your NIT...



I must admit, I only tried it out on my wifi network. The host on which I run rhythmbox is my laptop, with my media library mounted through NFS over wifi, and I'm not having any problems...

[BOFH]

I must test this asap, using uPnP with kills my N800 due to the size of the share and I have a lot of stuff with Russian, Korean and Japanese characters.

Plus have to testing porting your X to a Windows client {running a X11 Server}?

Originally Posted by CrashandDie

I've been playing a bit more with this, and this is what I've got out of it:

I use rhythmbox as my primary media player on Linux, now, with the sound exported to the IT, one could easily go as far as to think "Hey, what would happen if I X-tunnel my media player ?"

I'm running Gnome, so I click on System -> Preferences -> Sound, and instead of Autodetect, I choose ESD for sound playback. Now it's time to run rhythmbox

sudo gainroot
ssh -X user@host rhythmbox

Et voilà, you just exported your whole audio library to your NIT...



I must admit, I only tried it out on my wifi network. The host on which I run rhythmbox is my laptop, with my media library mounted through NFS over wifi, and I'm not having any problems...

[CrashandDie]

Originally Posted by BOFH

I must test this asap, using uPnP with kills my N800 due to the size of the share and I have a lot of stuff with Russian, Korean and Japanese characters.

Plus have to testing porting your X to a Windows client {running a X11 Server}?

Glad you liked it,

As for using SSH X Forwarding on Windows, I'd suggest you read this. Go straight for the 4th setup he talks about. This is basically a guideline, It's 5 years old, so a few things changed since then, but the same principles apply.

Cheers