[nas] synchronized or redirectable remote audio?

[Paul Fox]

 > > 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.
 > > 

 ... <snip of pleasant nighttime soundtrack>...

 > 	That question has been asked before, without any resolution of
 > course.  One thing that occurred to me would be to hack up the equivalent
 > of the X11 XSYNC extension into NAS which might be adequate.  Of course,
 > the ability to add extensions to NAS has long been on my 'dream' list...

what does XSYNC do?

 > > 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?
 > > 
 > 
 > 	Well, audiooss does something like this when it needs to reset
 > it's settings - it closes the current nas connection and reopens a new one
 > with the new parameters.  I'm not sure this is something that should be
 > handled by libaudio, since it can be easily done by the client.

yes, i suppose you're right.

 > 	It almost sounds like that what you need would be some sort of nas
 > proxy client that could A) handle opening and closing connections to
 > multiple servers, and B) providing some simple synchonization between
 > them.  ie:  You use 1 mpg123 client to send data to the nas proxy, then
 > that proxy sends the data to one or more nas servers.  If there was a SYNC
 > protocol extension in NAS, then your proxy could also deal with keeping
 > the streams synchronized more precisely...

are there any existing nas "relay" agents that i could start from?  (i'm
not sure why there would be -- it wouldn't be all that useful a program
all by itself...)

paul
=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf at foxharp.boston.ma.us (arlington, ma, where it's 44.8 degrees)