Zoned Audio (1 Viewer)

[daftdom]

driezl,

What a great idea with the two sound cards!
I have been wondering how I could get your type of setup with a sound card, it didn't even occur for me to use two sound cards!

I think I might run another app (winamp maybe) on my HTPC to do this zoned music stuff and use MP for the main HT screen.

Anyone doing something along these lines?


Thanks,
Dom

 

[rsbrux]

Bump?
I have been repeatedly tempted to defect to JRiver Media Center (JRMC) because of its many built-in audio features (including multi-zone), but always wind up staying with MP because of its better 10' interface and more complete feature set. If zoned audio isn't happening in MP any time soon, what experience does anyone have doing this with an external player?

 

[hwahrmann]

With the new player architecture, which i'm currently developing, it should be possible to play multiple streams at the same time.
However there are no plans at the moment to implement multi-zone features into MP.
At least not in MP1.

 

[rsbrux]

With the new player architecture, which i'm currently developing, it should be possible to play multiple streams at the same time.
However there are no plans at the moment to implement multi-zone features into MP.
At least not in MP1.

Don't be so coy ;-)
I would be satisfied with being able to play one stream in multiple zones, but maybe that is an even greater challenge.
When you say "At least not in MP1", can we hope for MP2?

 

[tourettes]

I would be satisfied with being able to play one stream in multiple zones, but maybe that is an even greater challenge.

Synchronizing two separate streams renderred on two separate audio HWs is going to be a quite big challenge. If the streams run more than few ms apart from each other you are going to experience nice echo which will definitely ruin the whole music experince.

 

[hwahrmann]

With the new player architecture, which i'm currently developing, it should be possible to play multiple streams at the same time.
However there are no plans at the moment to implement multi-zone features into MP.
At least not in MP1.

Don't be so coy ;-)
I would be satisfied with being able to play one stream in multiple zones, but maybe that is an even greater challenge.
When you say "At least not in MP1", can we hope for MP2?

So multiple-zones in this case would be to play the same stream on multiple output devices attached to the same PC? Right?
i think that should be achievable, tough i need to look into it a bit

 

[MrCrabs]

With a client in each room having it's owm set of speakers you can have zoned audio for sure.

Only thing that won't work is to use one client in one zone to start playing audio in another zone (like having a party and you want to play the same songs in the yard as in the livingroom and want to use the livingroom's client to control the music with).
But that might be possible if some kind of remote interface is used as aMPdroid uses to control MP clients, maybe it can be used to control more than one client at a time?

 

[MrCrabs]

With the new player architecture, which i'm currently developing, it should be possible to play multiple streams at the same time.
However there are no plans at the moment to implement multi-zone features into MP.
At least not in MP1.

Don't be so coy ;-)
I would be satisfied with being able to play one stream in multiple zones, but maybe that is an even greater challenge.
When you say "At least not in MP1", can we hope for MP2?

So multiple-zones in this case would be to play the same stream on multiple output devices attached to the same PC? Right?
i think that should be achievable, tough i need to look into it a bit

Yeah, a multi-zone setup connected to the server could be done by fading to different speaker outputs.

 

[rsbrux]

I am planning to eventually set up MP clients in other rooms to play media from my MP library. This is partly out of desperation, because MP still doesn't have a built-in UPNP server for music, so I can't use my old IPdio for this without installing (yet) another server and building another library.
I would like to also be able to use these to have MP play the same music throughout my apartment, but I realize that this might be unrealistic, as tourettes has warned above. OTOH, network latency in my WLAN should be negligible, and I am planning to use the same HW for all of the client PCs, which should minimize the spread in time delays.
I used to have wireless (800 MHz FM) speakers fed through my receiver's "Zone 2" outputs, but had to dispose of them due to in-band interference. Some alternatives which have occurred to me:

1. Pull zone 2 cabling throughout my apartment.
2. Use a commercial RF coupling solution and hope that the newer 2.5 GHz coupling is
   1. more interference-resistant
   2. able to penetrate my brick (probably) and concrete (probably not) interior walls
3. Buy a separate commercial solution (e.g. Sonos), which claims to do this.

Obviously, each of these has its disadvantages, and I would far prefer an MP-based solution. I realize that it would need some provision to tweak the delay, which might not be trivial, and maybe there are other things on the dev team's todo list which are more important to a larger user population.
Anyway, I just wanted to have it on the wish list.

 

[johanj]

I use MP(sever+client) for all media apart for music. I went for Squeezeboxes instead and are happy with this solution. It's much easier/cheaper to add a new SB music zone compared to adding a new HTPC with MP.