Personally I've used PulseAudio to send audio over the network from my Linux NUC to my Windows Desktop, so I could watch videos and similar on it without using noisy analog audio or get a new soundcard with optical input. This seems like it could fill a similar role except in reverse.

I have separate monitors but use Symless Synergy to share the mouse and keyboard.

This, but in reverse. My soundcard was on a Linux host and I used scream from a Windows VM. Worked beautifully.

PulseAudio works on Windows? Last time I've tried installing it I didn't get very far.

I just used the Cygwin version, worked straight up.

I've added it as a scheduled task, set to start on user login, so I don't have to mess with installing it as a service. I'm not going to listen without logging in to my desktop anyway so for me not a huge restriction.

With this you can cheaply replicate a Sonos style whole home networked music system, by having the recievers be something like some raspberry pi zeros wired up to some amplified speakers.

Ive been wary of stuff like Sonos due to the cost and the proprietary nature of the tech, but this Scream driver seems to be a nice simple alternative.

I don't have a sonos but isn't one of the selling points the fact that clients are kept in sync? Does this actually do that? Shairport-sync does.

Well, if the receivers are always-on, and listening for the UDP packets from the Windows PC, then surely any lag causing de-syncs would be minimal - in the millisecond range.

For a one-speaker-per-room setup, it would probably be 'good enough'.

Needs investigation I think.

I think you'll be surprised how quickly it drives you nuts (if there's ever the situation where you are hearing another speaker). There's also the rather brilliant https://github.com/badaix/snapcast if you do want sonos-like synchronised playback.

Snapcast would likely work better for this use case - it handles audio endpoint synchronization.

https://github.com/badaix/snapcast

Oooh wasn't aware of Snapcast. Thanks! Bookmarked.

Definitely stay away from Sonos. I bought a pair of cheap Ones a month ago and next thing I knew I had four Ones, four Play:1s, two Beams, and a Connect.

Looking through the source, this implementation is only stereo (so far). Might not be too hard to expand that out to 5.7/7.1.

https://github.com/duncanthrax/scream/blob/35bc85bd830fe40e8...

The Raspberry Pi outputs audio at 14 bits. Its DAC might be too noisy for music applications.

I think most for audio playback would be using an external DAC (i2s or USB).

I use it to send audio from my Windows QEMU VM (running on its dedicated GPU) to the Linux host for playback.

That. Or hotels. Multicast is great for things like this, just it doesn't tend to work over ISP networks, just on a local network.

sonos alternative