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I was just made aware of this application:

http://www.rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/

I tried it out, broadcasting from my iMac over 802.11x to a macbook-- works wonderfully.

The "sender" app is only $25, the "receiver" app is free.  Available for mac, windows, iPod Touch/iPhone . . .  I imagine the sender would need an open laptop and a router, and the receivers would use Touchs/iPhones.

 

Any interest in giving this a whirl?

I've been trying to crack this nut for about 6 years and this is the dream-solution.

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gadgetguy,

I don't think you'd want repeaters-- I keep repeating this and maybe I'm just not doing a good job of describing it . . .

Unless you are relatively equidistant to two or more sound sources, or very close to all, you're going to hear the sound staggered significantly, such that it would be unteneable. Even if you could increase the range, you would not want to try something like this with anything but a cluster of sound bikes riding together within 50 feet of each-other, at most.

It seems that a clever program would buffer the stream and utilize some type of time synching method (off a GPS signal perhaps?).  A very clever program would actually use the relative locations of the recievers to adjust for phase shift.

Someday someone will figure this out. 

A less elegant solution would be to have the music preloaded on all the sound sources, then simply coordinate from a common time signal (again perhaps GPS) so there is no transmission during the event at all.



gadgetguy said:

It seems that a clever program would buffer the stream and utilize some type of time synching method (off a GPS signal perhaps?).  A very clever program would actually use the relative locations of the recievers to adjust for phase shift.

 

Are you applying this to use for a bike ride?  You're not talking about one static set of ears to adjust for-- you're talking about a moving group with multiple listeners changing positions constantly.

 

Someday someone will figure this out. 

A less elegant solution would be to have the music preloaded on all the sound sources, then simply coordinate from a common time signal (again perhaps GPS) so there is no transmission during the event at all.

 

That's what we used to do.  It was fun but invariably someone's player would hiccup or just not run at the same speed as the others.

With regards to the dynamic system, the software would have to constantly readjust for the changing locations of the players.   This would be possible (although with alot of work) and yes, any lag would be problematic (but thats why I mentioned buffering the stream).   You are never going to have optimum sound quality, but im sure something listenable is possible.

 

With regards to the prerecorded option, you need all the players synched (constantly), so if one has problems it simply drops out until it can get to the same spot everyone else is at.

 

I dont mean to imply any of this is easy.  It is a very worthwhile project.

I was kind of happy I found something ready made and functional, and not too expensive.

There really has been nothing quite like this available in the ~ 6 years I've been watching.

gadgetguy, are you going to write this software?

I can't tell if anyone actually took the time to see how Airfoil works.

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