I'd like to be able to have a good UI program to share music across my local network. VLC has the capability, but the playlists have limitations, and the interface just doesn't seem to work well for audio. This next statement is going to illustrate my lack of knowledge of the underlying sound modules:

The perfect solution would be something that would stream anything that was playing the the OS's sound to a place that multiple computers could read from. If I could play songs via banshee or amarok, and the sound would get streamed to other computers, that would be great.

My ultimate plan is to utilize some old laptops I have with some speakers in places like the bedrooms, bathrooms, etc.

If someone knows of something that works better than vlc to stream audio, let me know.

Have you looked into mpd?

I too have been dabbling in this area, largely unsuccessfully though. However, I haven't done everything. You might check into mt-daapd which a computer to publish your music directory using DAAP (apples protocol). Although I'm having some problems with this currently (can't get the database created), but you might have different results. Another thing to check out would be pulseaudio, its something new that is supposed to make network sound "transparent", so you'd be able to select a remote machines soundcard for an output device on another. Last thing I can think of... Amarok has at least one script that I've used to successfully stream music to another computer, don't remember what its called and a quick googling isn't bringing me too it. The problem with that though, is that if you wanted them to be in sync, they're not, there is around a .5 second delay, but I'm not sure if anything is going to be able to fix that....I have high hopes for pulseaudio though, just haven't had time to play with it...It comes default on fedora 8, thats about all I can say as far as help with that though. hope this helps.