Music Hunger
So I’ve been trying out the Yahoo! Music Engine along with Yahoo! Music Unlimited service (free for Y! employees for a year, yay). I must say that while exhibiting all the strangeness and quirks that you expect from an alpha, it’s still a very cool product. Having access to a million of songs rocks. However, it only runs on Windows at this point. I am trying to figure out how to get it to play the music through my living room stereo. Could I set up a shoutcast server on the Windows box and have it streamed through there somehow? Any other solutions that involve buying as little hardware as possible?
27/05/2005 at 3:41 am Permalink
As far as I know shoutcast is implemented for Winamp as a plugin, either as a DSP one or it might be an output plugin, I’m not sure about this.
Winamp works like this:
Input plugin -> DSP plugin(s) -> Output plugin
If shoutcast is a DSP plugin, it gets the whole stream that you play in Winamp, broadcasts it and passes the input flow to the next DSP plugin in the chain so it finally gets to the output plugin. The output plugin can then be the DirectSound or the WaveOut plugin so you can not only broadcast your stream but listen to it at the same time. This is how I expect it to work, I never got really far into it.
In this case, the following is an ugly solution because of the analog/digital conversions but you might do the following:
0. Install and activate the shoutcast plugin for winamp
1. Connect the audio output of your soundcard to the line input of the same card.
2. Open the Windows Volume Control and choose the line input to be the recording source. (I don’t know if this step is really necessary)
3. In Winamp, press Ctrl+l and enter linein:// to start streaming from the line input.
This way when you play something on your computer, it gets back on the line input, winamp passes the stream to the shoutcast plugin which broadcasts it. Make sure Winamp doesn’t send the stream to your soundcard again
I think this is one of the cheapest solutions and you only need a cable with 3.5″ jack plugs and a soundcard with full-duplex capability but I think today all soundcards have this.
A software-only solution would be awesome.
27/05/2005 at 1:17 pm Permalink
As I know shoutcast can forward another media server’s stream. Maybe you can forward at your home…