[nas] synchronized or redirectable remote audio?

[Paul Fox]

i've been setting up a simple (?) home audio system based loosely on
the capabilities of mpg123 (w/ nas support) and nas.

this system lets me, from a web page, direct an mp3 stream to the
soundcard connected to one of several diskless systems around the
house.  one of these is connected to the livingroom stereo, and it
obviously gets the most exercise, but there are others in the kitchen
and study that i use less frequently.

one of the things i naively tried was to use an mp3 rebroadcaster
(icecast) to send the same stream to several destinations at once,
thinking i'd get the equivalent of "remote speakers", and be able to
listen to the same music all over the house.  silly me.  buffering and
propagation delays make this completely unusable -- with a single
source going to icecast, and being picked up by a couple of mpg123
processes, and sent to two remote nas servers, i had a delay between
the systems of well over a second -- this was not a subtle "delay"
effect by any means.  :-)

so:  has anyone ever heard of any work done on synchronized remote
audio?  i'm thinking of some sort of lightweight protocol among the
clients that keeps them in sync during playback.

i fully expect that question to be answered with deafening silence. 
:-)

so, let's try for something maybe more tractable.  as a fallback, i'd
like to be able to move the audio stream from (single) room to
(single) room.  if, for example, i'm listening to music in the living
room, and decide to go to the kitchen to make dinner, i'd like to be
able to tell the mpg123 process that AUDIOSERVER has changed, on the
fly, and that music should now go to a new destination, preferable
fairly seamlessly.  clearly there's a bunch of closing/re-opening that
has to happen, and i suspect the nas api's aren't capable of doing
something like this.  anyone have any thoughts on clever ways to do
this with existing tools, or not-too-extensive changes to nas client
library internals that could make it possible?

paul
=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf at foxharp.boston.ma.us (arlington, ma, where it's 39.2 degrees)