Kronalias

How To – Multiple Audio Output Control

Or: The answers to problems you never knew you had until you read this post…

If you follow this, even if only out of a sense of idle curiosity, you’ll download software (RealPlayer, WinAmp, Real VNC). Always pick the free one – it’s good enough!

1. The Basic Problem

I have a headless PC (no keyboard, video or mouse, and not much else either) on XP that I use primarily to stream music, and I needed to control this from an Axim, laptop and a couple of other gizmos I have.

The audio needs to come out of the PC in two streams simultaneously – one via analog out to an FM transmitter I built to broadcast over my house, and the other via A2DP Bluetooth to a BT receiver.

2. Controlling the Headless PC

I tried Remote Desktop and Terminal Services but didn’t like either. They either idle timed out after ten minutes, mucked up the audio or had other problems. I settled on Real VNC – it’s free, easy to use and, quite frankly, is exactly what I wanted. The info is at Post #28 on this page:
WM6 Remote Desktop on Axim X51V with WM5!

That sorts out controlling the Headless PC from either a handheld or PC.

3. Playing music

This lot applies to the Headless PC. The wonderful TCPMP won’t stream in two directions at once. Great shame. I also needed to play rtsp streams from Live365.com and, plug for my own site, the Beebotron

If you’re not using Firefox as your browser go get it from here:
Mozilla Firefox in English | Mozilla Europe

You’ll need RealPlayer (yuck, I know, but bear with me). Go get Real from here: http://www.real.com/
Configure Real so that .ra and .ram files are associated with it.

Make sure you can click on an rtsp type link (any of the links in Beebotron will do) and Real starts up and plays.

That’s the basic music setup. Now let's mess about a bit…

4. Multiple audio output streams

We’re going to use WinAmp with a couple of plugins.
The first one lets you play Real media via WinAmp (but you need RealPlayer installed first); the second allows you to stream your audio to multiple simultanous sound devices.

Go get the following:
WinAmp: Winamp Media Player - MP3, Multimedia, and Music Player
WinAmp Real plugin: Free-Codecs.com :: Download Tara's Real Audio Input Plugin 1.0.3b (for Winamp) : Real Audio Input Plugin allows Winamp to play real audio, real video...
WinAmp Multiple Output plugin: Winamp Plug-in Details - Customize Winamp Media Player

Install these, and play about with WinAmp until you’re happy.

5. The registry hack

If you click on a .ra or .ram link in Firefox then RealPlayer will launch and start playing. We don’t want this – we need WinAmp to start instead.

Click Start, then Run, then type regedit.

Under My Computer, then HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT scroll down until you see an entry called rtsp.

Open rtsp and you’ll see this:
rtsp
..DefaultIcon
..shell
....open
......command
..shellex
....ContectMenuHandlers
......RealPlayerHandler

Click the ‘command’ item and in the right pane you’ll see:
(Default) REG_SZ "C:\Program Files\Real\RealPlayer\RealPlayer.exe" "%1"

Doubleclick the (Default) and change the key to:
"C:\Program Files\Winamp\winamp.exe" "%1"

Quit regedit, start up Firefox, click on a Real link and, hey presto, it starts in WinAmp!

Job done – hope it helps someone – if you’ve read this far you need more fresh air…

Cheers, Kronalias