Cheap network music playback [closed]

Question

Here's what I want:

• Software for my computer that acts like an sound card driver, but instead of producing sound, it transmits the data over my home network. No dongles!
• A device that I can plug into a set of speaker or a receiver that simply receives that data and converts it to an analog signal for plugging into a hi-fi or a set of speakers
• All controls should be on the end of the broadcasting computer
• Said system must be cheap
• Said system should be cross-platform
• Multicast would be a plus

Basically, I want to wirelessly be able to play music from my computer over my stereo, with no additional hardware to worry about on the sending end.

I've been looking for such a system for years, and still haven't found anything. I have something like this that works over Bluetooth, but the bandwidth is not suitable for high-quality playback and the range is not suitable to use throughout my whole home. It has to work over WiFi, although Ethernet on the receiving end is okay.

Answer 1

I've been thinking about this for a while and here's my prelim design

if you take an old computer and run a custom OS that only listens to UDP packets on its network (either wifi or ethernet) and outputs the wav segment on it to the soundcard (hooked to the speakers/amp perhaps with a preamp on it if it needs it)

I'd suggest using 2 overlapping buffers that you fill with the wav segments (have the sound segments overlap so a lost packet doesn't cause a skip in the sound)

then you only need to create a sound card driver on the main machine that transmits the sound in wav on UDP multicast

downside is a bit of lag due to the buffering

then again I see it's been done before. check out How to stream music from notebook to speakers via wi-fi?