David Ernst Chats with the World

Who knows how true it is, but I certainly enjoyed [this episode of the K-Chronicles](http://www.buzzle.com/showImage.asp?image=11041). And it sure seems believable. You’d think that anyone against, say, increased government spending would not appreciate the current administration.

Ever since getting a laptop, I’ve pretty much stopped sitting at my desktop. It acts more like a home server these days, and not a very busy one at that. One thing that it has been doing for me, though, is music. It’s right next to my stereo, so I can play music on my computer through my stereo just by short cables running between them.

But, this is now inconvenient. Since I use my laptop much more frequently — including right now! — it’d be nicer to play music from here than climbing up to my desktop. I thought “someone should make a sound transmission system that works like WiFi or cordless telephones.” I could plug a little transmitter into my laptop, and then send the sound signal to a receiver connected to my stereo.

Well, not surprisingly, such things do exist. In fact, they can do audio and video! I don’t have need for the video, but I couldn’t find an audio only version, so I ended up ordering [this one that does audio and video](http://www.x10.com/products4/google/wireless_video_sender.html). Only $50, and that includes free shipping!

So, I was pretty excited when it came last week. I hooked it all up and…. it sounded terrible. :( I was able to deal with many of the sound quality issues, but the one that I couldn’t get past was a fast clicking sound. Naturally, I was disappointed. As I frequently do in such situations, I decided to set it aside, and call the company about it another day.

So, a couple of days later, I called X10. I was on hold for a long time (about 30 minutes, after their phone queue had predicted 10 minutes…). It was long enough to do some more troubleshooting. I found that if I turned off both my computer and my wireless access point (WAP) then the clicking would stop. I actually think the clicking might have been caused by the wireless “beacon”, because that was set on my WAP to go every 100ms = 1/10th of a second, and that seemd to be about the frequency that the clicking was happening. It also makes sense that that would have been sending out a signal on lots of frequencies (changing “channels” on either the WAP or the VideoSender(TM) did not solve the problem).

Whatever the case, I eventually talked with a very nice support provider, and he said that some people had problems with this. He suggested moving the receiver further away from the WAP. My house isn’t that big, and basically, I just didn’t want to do this. He thought that switching to 802.11g might help, but couldn’t answer whether I would have to get both an 802.11g WAP AND a card for my laptop. Whatever the case, I was considering the experiment a failure, and was ready to give up. I scheduled an RMA for the product.

But! It was easy to be willing to give up, because while I was on hold, I had had another idea! Couldn’t I somehow rig something up where I could send the sound over my IP network? I figured I could probably at least set up an X Windows session such that the laptop was running a sound player on the server. I started running google searches for advice, and ended up learning that the [Enlightened Sound Daemon](http://freshmeat.net/projects/esound/) (which I was already running) can be set up to accept sound streams over an TCP/IP port! (16001 is the default port number, for anyone who cares). It turned out to be very easy to do, too. I’m not sure how far I got, but by the time I was done being on hold, I was pretty sure I was going to be able to get it working.

Well, it’s working. Not all sound players support it, unfortunately, but on XMMS it was very easy. So, I’m sitting here now, typing this post on my laptop, watching the activity light on my WiFi card glow warmly as it sends Dvořák (played by The Cleveland Orchestra (conducted by Dohnányi)) to my stereo via my desktop upstairs. Although the technology of it makes perfect sense to me, it still feels pretty much like magic. If I opened a hole in my firewall, I guess I could send music through my stereo from any correctly configured computer on the Internet! Not sure what the use of that would be, although I guess it could be used as a ramshackle VoIP phone. :)

But, yeah, sure am happy that I went this route. I’ll get my $50 back, and the sound quality is better than that other thing ever would have been. Plus I can just marvel at how cool it is! The one down side is that it won’t be as easy to have friends play music from their laptops through my sound system. But if they care enough, I think there’s esound support for windows. :)