Hi to all. I have a vision, which is to say I have a want and no idea how to achieve it so I thought I would see if anyone here might know how to get me moving in the right direction.

I have a home network with hosts all running some form of linux (Ubuntu or Mandriva at present). Each machine has it's own respectable sound setup. One machine houses the samba share //musicserver/library and all other machines play mp3's from the share.

What I want to achieve is for all of the machines to have the ability to be controlled centrally so that from one machine an audio player is run on all machines simultaneously essentially creating a "whole house audio" effect.

I see a number of potential killers such as differing hardware performance, but I would not let something like differing distro's be a show stopper as it would be easy enough to dual boot on any machine.


Any help would be appreciated as always. Thank You.

'Controlling' all machines from one may not be exactly what you're after. You would probably be better off streaming the audio from the server. Have a look into icecast and pulseaudio - one of them might do what you want.

That makes sense and sounds easier. Thank you.