Hello all,

I'm looking for some pointers on a method to "transfer" the
song-playing from my laptop to my PC, both running ubuntu.

The use case is: I'm home listening to some song on the laptop. Then I realize how crappy the speakers are. Here's what I do *now*:

1. Stop playback on the laptop
2. Get up, go to the PC, open the music player
3. Find the same song
4. Try to find the same point in the song
5. Stop playback on the laptop
6. Start playback on the PC (the PC has good speakers)

Of course now I'm dreaming of having a "button" I push that does all this all by itself. Can anyone give me some pointers?

Thank you for any help!

If you have a home LAN, you can get Pulseaudio to stream the music to your desktop ... I don't know if you can switch this mid-stream though.

For that matter, set up a music server on the desktop and use that from wherever you are when at home... discipline.

You could adopt a player which tells you the actual time elapsed in playback, then when you go to the PC, you can select the exact position in the track you left off. I'm not sure where that gets you though: personally I'd find the gap breaks the flow too much ... just getting annoyed enough with the quality to want to switch players would spoil it for me. If the track were that much worth playing then is it not worth starting it over?

Hello,

Thank you for the answer. However the mechanism I have in mind is a music player that reports or logs somehow what song is playing. I then want to use this information (name, or even path of the song that is playing) relay that info to the desktop (I'm thinking of ssh) and tell the desktop to start playing this same song (from the start). I've given up on the seamless transition, at least for now.

So, any ideas or pointers on where to start?

Same as I said last post - what you just described is a music server.

Would something like ftp://ftp.solucorp.qc.ca/pub/netaudio/ be of any help?

I think you have the same songs in the pc and the laptop. Anyway, if you can ssh into the pc it would be good. You can use mplayer to play the music. Mplayer has an astonishing amount of options that can be used to make listening to music a real pleasure. You can also combine it with the screen command and astonish an average winduhs users?
P.S:- Most of my winduhs friends just gape in awe when they see something like this. The look is worth all the efforts put in

Hello, thanks for the replies.

I followed advice and looked up on google what exactly is a music server. I found pulseaudio very interesting, but it is not what I'm looking for.

I'm looking for a system that gives me more freedom to leave my house, and so not dependent on the local area network. I'm looking for some way for one computer to "pass the buck" to the other computer. In my vision, I could be home listening to a song on the PC and then realize it's time to leave the house. I could then tell the server to "pass the buck" to the laptop and leave the house listening to the same song.

Of course in the future I dream of doing this with an android phone. Or maybe the reverse: I arrive home, listening to a song on my android phone and then "pass the buck" to the PC (the one that is plugged to the good speakers). The PC then starts playing the same song and I can even turn off the phone. One day...

For now I'm only focused on the transmission between the laptop and the PC. Any help?