electric relaxation

I can now selectively stream audio from my Ubuntu laptop over to my Windows Media Center HTPC using the Enlightenment Sound Daemon. The esound package has apparently been part of Cygwin for a while now. I had originally planned to set this up using VMware, i.e. by running esd in a guest VM on my Windows MCE machine; having esound on the host makes things even easier:

1. Install Cygwin, and select the esound and cygrunsrv packages in addition to the default set.
2. Configure esd to run as a service:

   $ cygrunsrv -I esd -p /usr/bin/esd -a ‘-tcp -public’ \                       -d ‘Enlightenment Sound Daemon’


3. Start esd: net start esd

That’s it. To play sound on the machine from any gstreamer-based application:

1. Run gstreamer-propertiers and choose ESD as the default audio output plugin.
2. Start up a gstreamer-based application, like Rhythmbox, with the ESPEAKER environment variable set to yourhost:16001:

   $ ESPEAKER=mce:16001 rhythmbox

3. Start playing music and watch the magic happen.

You can even play sound locally while streaming remotely, since only the applications using the custom ESPEAKER variable will push their audio remotely.

Update:
My office mate informs me that the Pulse Audio system is essentially a “much better version of ESD”. I can’t imagine it’s really worth switching over since everything works well enough for my needs right now, but I’ll probably give it a shot anyway because I’m a sucker.