Ideas for playing music library on two PC's simultaneously?

Byron172

Have done a bit of research on this one but can't find anything "perfect" so far. Just wondering if anyone here has any ideas.....

I want to be able to play my Music files on both my main PC and on my laptop "SIMULTANEOUSLY". So at a party the music playing in one room is the same as the music playing in the backyard and so on....

The main PC and laptop are networked via wirless router but have slightly different O/S (Vista & 7), so streaming via Media Player is not an option as one has 11 and one has 12.....I don't understand how to do it using VLC or WinAMP either, but if anyone knows or can explain that'd be great. Any user friendly, freeware apps would be great too.

Cheers....

kryyst

I know this doesn't exactly help your situation. But a really simple (though it'll cost you $100) is to get an Apple Airport Express. You can then use itunes to play your music on one machine and have it simultaneously broadcast over the Airport Express which connect to a stereo through an audio out cable. It works really well.

In VLC you create a webstream and then on the remote computer connect vlc to that stream. I've done this for video and it works well enough.
http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Vlc-to-Stream-Audio-and-Video-to-Multiple-Computers-on-Your-Network-Using-Multicast

Another (arguably easier) alternative is to use shoutcast to create your own internet radio station and broadcast it that way.

Byron172

thanks kryyst - if all else fails I will fork out some dough for the Airport Express. Only poroblem is that I dont have a stereo

I tried VLC but apparently you need to use the widowswx interface in order to get the "File" option.

This may sound really dumb for someone who has been tinkering with PC's for almost a decade, but I can't work out how to get THAT interface!!! I have found a couple of tutorials to stream via VLC but both start with the instruction to "Click [FILE]" etc.....

And as for Shoutcast - I tried setting up a broadcast through WinAMP but the plugin wont work as I get an error stating that the program can't run because it can't find NSCRT.dll.....:banghead:

I also looked at "Share Speaker Player" but that will play on one or the other not BOTH simultaneously....My only other option that I have come up with is to maybe use logmein and connect via VPN but that'd chew up a bit of my download usage I reckon....

Thanks again for your help.

kryyst

I'm not following you by what you mean you need to use the windowswx inteface to get the file option.

Looking at it now and compared to the most recent version of VLC some of the options have changed a bit. So do this to get past that part.

Open VLC, Go to media open the file you want to play and it'll start playing in VLC. Then hit CTRL+W to open the broadcast wizard. I'll assume you want to stream more then one file so you'll either have to create a play list or instead of opening a file inside VLC use the open folder option instead.

Then just on the other computer point vlc on it to the broadcasting computer and your good to go.

Byron172

cool - thanks for the tip. Have also found older versions of VLC on file hippo so will give it go using an older version if the above method doesn't work.

Thanks again for your help kryyst.

Byron172

OK - sorted.

I downloaded an older version of VLC from File Hippo (Version 0.8.6i) which has the interface that everyone describes in their tutorials. That made it a lot simpler to follow the guides etc....still quite a lengthy process but succeeded in the end. For anyone who wants to do this themselves - one tip to remember is that the computer you are streaming from won't play the A/V unless you open another instance of VLC and stream from it...that was the main hurdle I found when trying to get this up and running.