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How would I take all sound on a windows machine and broadcast it over the network for other machines to hear?

I can find instructions for individual apps, but I don't want to do this on a per app basis, I want everything sent to that sound output.

Note that this is not asking how to share music over the network, iTunes and Media Player have that sorted, nor is it how to use a machine as a remote microphone, skype/voip has that sorted, I'm asking how to stream all sound on that machine, regardless of source, that includes the beeps skype makes, audio from games, dings on error dialogs, browser sounds, etc etc

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Are you expecting them all to be perfectly in sync, i.e. coming out through speakers in the same room at the same time? – Kieren Johnstone Feb 3 '12 at 7:49
No, that would probably require an MIT team and several years of research from what I understand of acoustics =p What I'd ideally like to be able to do is walk around with headphones and an iPhone/Android phone rather than having speakers on loud or faffing around with bluetooth, afterall I've got a wifi connection already =p – Tom J Nowell Feb 3 '12 at 12:26
Not that its the only use of such a thing, I can think of many more – Tom J Nowell Feb 3 '12 at 12:26

3 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

Simple, use IceCast.

Free, open-source, cross-platform.

I interface to IceCast using Edcast (on Windows), allowing broadcast of audio in both vorbis and mp3 formats. (I think AAC as well!)

Have fun!

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This is great if I want internet radio, and I have mp3s and Vorbis files I want to stream, but it all falls apart when I'm streaming to my phone or a laptop, and my skype recieves a message and the 'ding' isn't a part of the mp3 tracklist, or when I load a youtube video and its audio doesn't get streamed, etc etc. If I wanted to stream my music library I would use iTunes homeshare, or media players upnp support. – Tom J Nowell Feb 6 '12 at 16:17
Edcast allows you to stream everything coming out of your sound-card into mp3 and/or vorbis streams. – A T Feb 7 '12 at 7:14
Nice, but How?? – Tom J Nowell Feb 7 '12 at 11:07
It does it by default. Just configure its connection to the icecast server, and it should all just work. – A T Feb 7 '12 at 16:45
Again, nice but how??!!?!?!?!? There is next to no documentation, none of it is clear, and the UI gives few clues. I installed edcast and icecast, launched icecast, then edcast, and tried to do something with it. If I click add encoder and then try to connect in edcast, it repeatedly tries to connect getting nowhere. There're no configuration options on where to connect it, or howto guide, or help buttons – Tom J Nowell Feb 7 '12 at 17:55
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+50

Can't say I've ever used it myself, but it looks like Airfoil from Rogue Amoeba will do just what you need. There are Mac and Windows versions to send audio, and Mac, Windows, and Linux versions to receive audio. It also works with airplay, so it should show up in iTunes and your iOS devices. The only downside is that it's a paid commercial application.

There's also SpeakerShare, which is free and open source, but doesn't have the airplay functionality. It looks like there are current Android and Mac versions, as well as depreciated Windows versions available under "All Downloads".

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air foil will have considerable lagg for video unless you are using a correct player on the recieving end. I wish there was a EASY way to do this – mjrider Feb 2 '12 at 15:26
looks like speaker share is no longer on google code – mjrider Feb 2 '12 at 15:31
up vote 1 down vote

PulseAudio should do what you want. There are client and server components for Linux, Mac and Windows.

PulseAudio will create a virtual audio device on your Windows machine. All sound coming to that can get routed over the network to your clients.

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wow...looks a tad complicated...is there a tutorial for how to installl? I didnt see one for mac – mjrider Feb 5 '12 at 3:27
It looks rather painful, especially since there are no GUI tools aside from linux and they don't appear to be keeping their house in order (win32 binaries link to opensuse, but opensuse only builds onpensuse builds despite the mingw32 label) – Tom J Nowell Feb 6 '12 at 16:14

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