Sending audio from hackintosh to windows PC

[neemz]

Hey folks I have found a solution to this problem but its not perfect and was wondering if anyone had a better solution.

 

In order to send audio from the Mac to Windows I have done the following.

 

Mac side:

Install soundflower to let applications send audio to each other

Installed esd using fink (can use darwin ports if you want)

Reboot and set default sound device as Soundflower 2CH

 

Windows:

Installed esd for windows (command line tools)

 

Then on windows I set up the ESD sound server with the following command

 

esd -tcp -public -noterminate

 

Then go over to the OS X machine and do the following

 

esdrec -s ::1 | esdcat -s ip_address_of_windows_machine

 

Then I start any application that plays audio on the mac, for the first couple of seconds of the connection being up its choppy but it settles after a couple of seconds. Only issue is there is a (roughly) 2 second lag from when a sound should play on the mac to it playing out the windows PC's speakers. This is fine when just playing music but if I watch a youtube clip (or any video for that matter) then its very annoying.

 

Does anybody have a better solution to this problem or have any ideas for lowering the lag?

 

The windows PC is a 3.2GHz Core 2 duo, and the os x machine is a 1.86Ghz Core 2 duo so I doubt there is any CPU related latency involved. As far as I am aware the audio stream is sent uncompressed but it is still only a tiny fraction of what my network can handle thus the audio should only have the same latency as my network connection (which is about 1-10ms).

 

Many thanks

 

neemz

 

Then on the mac

[fwappy]

That's an interesting method, although as an audio engineer, I prefer using physical audio connections. I just like to be able to directly control the signal flow and not worry about shared bandwidth.

 

If you're only doing this because your Windows PC is hogging your audio monitoring system, then I'd look at using a digital audio connection such as S/PDIF if possible. Using analog I/O would only add extra D/A and A/D conversions, so try to avoid that.

 

What kind of audio interfaces are in each machine?

[neemz]

I would use a cable if they were both PC's but since my hackintosh is a laptop I want to be able to move it about the room without being constrained by cables. Neither computer has any special sound equipment just the built in audio of both.

[xtraa]

There is also a freeware that can do that between Win/Lin/Mac. It is a one click solution:

 

http://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/speakers.php

 

Nevertheless, I like your workaround.

[MacUser2525]

Should be able to use VLC for this idea too all you would need to do it set it up to stream over the network then connect any computer you wanted to the stream to hear or if using video see it as well.