Broadcast / stream music to multible sources at same time

[Jaunty]

Title might not be the best but difficult for me to word. My Dad has been looking for a way to stream his music all over the house at the same time for a while now but cant find anything to do the trick.

Basically he has a hifi in each room of the house and just wants whatever is playing on his pc and / or iphone to play on all these hifi's at the same time. I thought I found the perfect thing in the Creative Xdock but unfortunatly it isn't compatable with iphone nor itouch.

Theres probably a much easier way of explaining what he wants but I'm not the best at it. Comes into his house, presses a button on his iphone (which he has already connected to the pc) and the whole house starts to play the same music.

I know running wires all over would do the trick but he doesn't want to do that and wants to keep it wireless. Preferably a system that can have around 10 recievers but a minimum of 4.

Sorry if this makes no sense to you.

[Killgannon]

are the things he wants to play from network enabled? if not cables maybe your easiest bet, otherwise you could look into fm transmitters and set all the boxes to the same station its broadcasting on, so everything comes across... sort of like how you can do it similarly in your car.... becareful of this however as FCC regulations restrict how far you can broadcast

edit: i now see you;re in scotland, so check local laws before broadcasting over FM

[Killgannon]

something like this: http://www.amazon.com/Crane-FMT-Digi...ref=pd_sim_e_2

also recievers are pretty much infinite with this, its mainly distance from the source you have to worry about

[Jaunty]

They are kind of network enabled in that they can connect to the wireless router and play internet radio and also files from the pc, but he cant set them up to play the same song at the same time.

An fm transmitter does seem to be the thing to go for, though how is the sound quality with them? That one your showing does look good. Thanks for the help. Affordable too so might have found what to get him for christmas!

[Soupbowl]

I am probably way off base, but one thing I have done is: I have a music server and a few rooms in my house have speakers connected to it. I use XMMS2
on it and I use a phone app to control it, I also can control it from any pc in the house. When I hit play I blast the music through out the house, it also has playlists etc which can be controlled from phone/pc also.

[Killgannon]

FM quality will never be CD quality, think of the quality you hear on the radio, it will be like that.

you said the appliances were network enabled, if they can play internet radio, you should be able to set up his own type of internet radio (shoutcast or ice cast) can control the stream via iphone or what not, and if they're all on to connect, they will all play the same stream at the same time.

do note however, that in doing this some may lag out if your network isnt fast enough/you're trying to push too high of quality down the pipe... so you'd want to try things until you find what sounds best...

FM would probably be easier to install and setup, but a stream is much easier to maintain and will get higher quality overall likely

[Jaunty]

Is XMMS2 just a program kind of like WMC and such? Doesn't look like it would do what he is after but I could easily be missing something.

Shoutcast looks pretty great actually, exactly what he would be after. Not 100% what his network speed is but it will certainly give him something to play with. Found a nice FM transmitter I may get him so he has both options though. The appliances are high quality so think he would prefer the higher quality sound. Looks like you've solved the problem thank you.

[Killgannon]

ill assume the appliances connect wirelessly, so it will likely give you 54Mbps out the the boxes if the network is fine, in reality he should be able to stream whatever bit rate he wants over the network depending on the source... Basically so you aren't wasting bandwidth, or trying to upscale anything (you can't do this... despite what some DVD players have you believe) i would set his stream at the average bitrate of his source MP3s... if he generally downloads 128kbps mp3s (ugh) set it to 128, if its 192 then use that, if its vbr id probably go 192 still... just remember that the shoutcast server and player will have to run on his pc, shoutcast can run as a service so you dont have to worry about that, and idk what player he's using, but most of the big ones (winamp, foobar, etc) have plugins so you can easily stream to the server from whatever he decides to use... in fact there should be an application out there that should do this for you... if i find it again, ill post the link

edit: also soupbowl is probably using icecast or something similar and just doesnt know it, xmms used to be the winamp alternative for linux, xmms2 is something i stopped following however