Create a wireless speaker setup without AirTunes
Jun 06, '06 07:30:01AM
Contributed by: bdavey01
I listen to music quite often on my PowerBook whilst studying, but, like most people, I find hearing it through the built-in speakers sacrilege. Aside from setting up my desk next to a stereo, the first solution that comes to mind is Apple's AirPort Express with Airtunes; this is essentially a wireless router that has a connection to your stereo, and has the ability to play audio from iTunes. This all comes at a price, however.
The following guide will show you how to live the champagne lifestyle on a cask-wine budget (at least with respect to your audio setup).
The solution
Thanks to the efforts of hard working and hospitable geeks, a free, open-source solution is at hand -- and has been since about 1998. Its name is the Enlightenment Sound Daemon (esd). The Enlightenment Sound Daemon is essentially a network-transparent audio protocol, in many ways is analagous to X11 with graphics (if you don't know what X11 is, then you're probably not geeky enough for this tutorial -- buy an AirPort Express).
What you'll need
This guide covers wireless audio streaming on my PowerBook, so from here on, I'm going to assume that you have a Macintosh running OS X. For your "sound transmitter," you'll need:
- An installed copy of DarwinPorts
- A copy of Audio Hijack Pro (1.3 or newer) by Rogue Amoeba. If you buy nothing else, I'd highly recommend purchasing this program. It's like a swiss army knife for all of your audio recording needs.
- Music!
- SoundFlower and Soundflowerbed -- top-notch loopback sound drivers. (Optional; needed only if you're too cheap to buy Audio Hijack.)
For your "sound-receiver," you'll need:
- A physical connection into a stereo or a set of speakers
- A computer GNU shell-like-environment. Eg linux, cygwin, darwin, etc.
- The Englightenment Sound Daemon installed (hint: if you're using cygwin, you can install the Englightenment sound daemon using setup.exe)
Setting up the sound receiver on the stereo-connected machine
I've got two "sound-receiver" access points: an old Toshiba Tecra500 (Pentium 120) in the lounge room running gentoo-linux, and a P3-700 with Windows XP (with a complete cygwin installation). I'll describe how to set up the latter:
- Open a cygwin bash shell and run this command: esd -tcp -public.
- Essentially this command starts up the Enlightenment sound daemon and allows it to receive sound from other IP addresses. You should hear a funky sound, denoting that esd is correctly up and running. If no sound is heard, then something isn't working, and you should read the esd manual and perform the usual troubleshooting procedures before proceeding.
Setting up your Macintosh to send audio to your sound receiver
- Make sure that you've got darwinports installed (thats, right, DarwinPorts).
- Install the enlightenment sound daemon using the port command: sudo port install esound. This may take some time, particularly if you're on a G3 or early G4. Grab a coffee.
- Open Audio Hijack Pro. Choose your audio source (eg iTunes), and hit Effects in the lower-right-hand corner of the window.
- Click to insert an effect. Choose "4FX effect--> Pipe Dream". You should now have an effect displayed in your audio hijack window.
- Insure that the "pipe dream" effect is not being bypassed. Click on Editor. A Pipe Dream script editor should now appear. On the lower-left-hand-side of this dialog, there should be a pull-down menu with Custom written on it. Enter the following script (and save it somewhere):
PATH=${PATH}:/opt/local/bin
<&0 esdcat -s *sound-server-ip*
For those who can't even afford Audio Hijack:
- Install DarwinPorts and esd (as mentioned above)
- Install Soundflower.
- Open up System Preferences and go to the Sound pane. Set up 'Soundflower 2-ch' as your default audio input, and your default audio output device, and close the preferences pane.
- Open up a terminal window, and enter the following: esdrec | esdcat -s your-sound-receiver-ip-here
- Your Mac's entire sound output should now be forwared to the remote machine.
[robg adds: I haven't tried this one.]
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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20060602065532384