Stardock Introduces Acoustic Bridge

Island Dog

Join Date 06/2003

+1048

Stardock Introduces Acoustic Bridge

Stardock is excited to announce a new application – Acoustic Bridge! Acoustic Bridge lets PC users direct audio from one PC to the speakers of another. Centralize the sound output from multiple PCs to a single PC. This enables you to transfer the audio notifications from any application, such as chat and mail programs or stock price alerts, from your desktop to your laptop.

Acoustic Bridge is in beta right now, and we have a special pre-order price of $7.95 which also gives you instant access to the beta. A free 30-day trial is available also.

https://www.stardock.com/products/acousticbridge/

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Rosco_P

Join Date 07/2009

+178

Quoting SpykeAlpha,

reply 24

One thing I've already noticed that makes this not very useful for me is that you have to have speakers (or headphones) plugged into the PC that you want to stream music from.

I was hoping that you could use this on a PC without speakers to stream the music to a primary PC (since I use Input Director to control multiple PC's from one).

Problem is, the secondary PC's don't have speakers... so Windows has the sound on mute because "No speakers or headphones are plugged in".

I want to say this is on a Realtek sound card, yes?

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They are. I went and fiddled around with a few things (updated the realtek drivers, toggle the sound card off in BIOS then back on, etc).

Something in all of that seemed to get it out of that state and just to "muted" normally. Now the sound is coming across fine.

This is quite awesome.

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Rosco_P

Join Date 07/2009

+178

Quoting SpykeAlpha,

reply 27

Something in all of that

Any guess as to what it was?

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Looking at some of the threads out there based on that text string, I'd say it was the BIOS toggle, tbh. Microsoft lists your soundcard being disabled in BIOS as one of the main reasons for that error. So if for some reason the system thought it was disabled at the BIOS level...

Seeing as how the drivers had been updated fairly recently, that was the only thing that I did that I think made any difference.

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c242

Join Date 03/2001

+383

You might want to look into this. Icon in the taskbar clones itself endlessly in the tray. Seems to happen on the receiver only.

Windows 7 64bit Home Premium.

EDIT: Happens while receiving, turn off sending on the other machine stops the cloning.

EDIT2 : On the 'sender' machine AB turns the volume on off on off every second. Creative Xi-Fi USB there.

EDIT3: Tried another machine as sender, same result. Audio is turned on/off forever. Needless to say no sound at all at the receiver...

Bought too soon, I guess. But as this is beta I hope the issues will be handled soon.

Network is gigabit here, just for info.

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Neil Banfield

Join Date 04/2001

+1104

Quoting c242,

reply 30

You might want to look into this. Icon in the taskbar clones itself endlessly in the tray. Seems to happen on the receiver only.

Windows 7 64bit Home Premium.

EDIT: Happens while receiving, turn off sending on the other machine stops the cloning.

EDIT2 : On the 'sender' machine AB turns the volume on off on off every second. Creative Xi-Fi USB there.

EDIT3: Tried another machine as sender, same result. Audio is turned on/off forever. Needless to say no sound at all at the receiver...

Bought too soon, I guess. But as this is beta I hope the issues will be handled soon.

Network is gigabit here, just for info.

I think the problem is on your receiver. It sounds like the process is crashing out constantly hence the repeated icons.

Could you look in the event log and see if there is information on crashing processes?

Also what does it say on the about box on the receiver for your audio setup?

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Great little product. Bought it almost immediately.

Two things though:

1. Would you consider making a mute toggle menu option when right clicking the tray icon when on the receiving computer. Or even "better", left clicking toggles mute. Right now I have to go a few clicks through the normal speaker icon and contextually doing it through the AB-icon would be nice to have.

2. Could you please explain how and when "Allow this machine to be unmuted" works. I tried some different scenarios but didn't get hold of it.

Oh, btw, I posted a link to the shopping page on the KVR forum: http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=4877060#4877060

Could be very useful for home producers/musicians wanting to lie down in the sofa while working.

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Rosco_P

Join Date 07/2009

+178

Quoting Masarin,

reply 32

2. Could you please explain how and when "Allow this machine to be unmuted" works. I tried some different scenarios but didn't get hold of it.

This would be if, say, you had a computer in your bedroom, and another in the living room. If you were streaming to the living room, but also wanted to listen to the audio in the bedroom, you could turn that option on, then unmute the bedroom computer so the music would be playing in both rooms.

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Quoting Rosco_P,

reply 33

Quoting Masarin, reply 322. Could you please explain how and when "Allow this machine to be unmuted" works. I tried some different scenarios but didn't get hold of it.

This would be if, say, you had a computer in your bedroom, and another in the living room. If you were streaming to the living room, but also wanted to listen to the audio in the bedroom, you could turn that option on, then unmute the bedroom computer so the music would be playing in both rooms.

Ok. Thanks for the answer. I'll try another round then.

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c242

Join Date 03/2001

+383

No logs, sorry.

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Is there any intention of making it possible to stream the audio to more than one computer? (in my case; 3 other household Win7 HomePremium)

Is there any intention of making the audio source selectable?

As a sidenote: the streamed audio quality is impressive.

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Skarny

Join Date 10/2002

+45

I'm not griping - just wanting to understand - how is this better than just loading the audio files from the master computer via homegroup/network file sharing/media player?

Is everything streamed from the master computer - not just individual applications - what is the expected scenarios where this is useful?
When I think of remote computer control I usually expect sound/visual/remote control to be needed all at once - not just audio.

Can I control what audio is playing on the master computer from the client computer? Or does everything have to be initiated on the master computer first?

Accoustic bridge sounds (giggle) interesting/useful - but I'm not understanding what need it is fulfilling.

Here's a suggestion which might be cool - open up the service to vbscript methods to send bursts of audio to and from computers - then I could build a little intercom system around my house network with DesktopX

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ZubaZ

Join Date 11/2001

+917

I don't want to use my main machine to play audio. My music is not on that machine and I don't want to use resouces on my primary. So I run the music off the laptop and listen on the primary.

I also have a server set to use audio alerts . . and I can hear those on teh primary too.

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Neil Banfield

Join Date 04/2001

+1104

The purpose of Acoustic Bridge is to basically act as a set of remote speakers where the sending computer is probably very close to the receiving computer.

Similar to Multiplicity which reduces the need for multiple keyboards and mice on your desktop, Acoustic Bridge reduces the need for multiple speaker systems as well as allowing say a laptop with poor speakers to share the much better speakers your desktop machine might have.

You might want to watch say a video while you work and using your laptop for it rather than your main computer frees up screen space, or you might be playing a game on the laptop and want to use your Desktop PC 5.1 audio setup.

As an example of usage, as well as a main PC I have a test box and a laptop both of which might be being used for various tasks, but any sound from any of them will come out the one set of speakers. If I need to mute sound then they all get muted at once, if I want to change the volume they all get changed at once.

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Skarny

Join Date 10/2002

+45

Thanks both Zubaz's and Neil's response have helped me to understand a bit better.

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c242

Join Date 03/2001

+383

New version, same problem.

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Neil Banfield

Join Date 04/2001

+1104

Quoting c242,

reply 41

New version, same problem.

Unfortunately you seem to be the only person with this problem and we have no usable information on the issue which makes it pretty hard for us to track down the issue.

My gut feeling is this is linked to something about your sound setup on the receiving computer which is causing the receiver process to crash out and restart constantly but without information on the crash we are pretty much blind.

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c242

Join Date 03/2001

+383

Neil, I will try to investigate a bit more into this today to give You some more info.

Also I will try different computers. Ater thinking a bit more Asio4All could be a suspect for causing this trouble.

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Sorry, but I don't see an answer to my questions:

Is there any intention of making it possible to stream the audio to more than one computer at a time?

Is there any intention of making the audio source selectable?

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ZubaZ

Join Date 11/2001

+917

Quoting Zboness,

reply 44

Sorry, but I don't see an answer to my questions:

Is there any intention of making it possible to stream the audio to more than one computer at a time?

Is there any intention of making the audio source selectable?

At this time Acoustic Bridge is feature complete. We will, of course, continue to watch the market and see what additional features are wanted and evaluate whether there is a case for adding those in.

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Thank you.

To answer someone's question of "why?": I live in an area without decent radio stations. I have one audio source that I want to stream all over the house. While I do not have a stereo in every room, I do have a computer in every room. Using the line input on one computer I'm trying to stream it across my home network. I'm not trying to stream video, just audio. Apparently, this is a brand new idea (sarcasm) as I have been unable to find a method of doing this short of spending $250 on an internet radio station, or purchasing (again hundreds of dollars) additional hardware. Doing this at a reasonable cost seems to be taboo. As far as I have been able to determine, this can be done on Mac products, but not on Windows without the expenditure. VideoLAN looks promising but I haven't figured out how to stream without a video source. -figured out: VLC uses the 239... broadcast addresses/ports and then intercepts the network stream. Source is "video=none". Having stutter issues using an AP, but other than that it's great!

For what it's worth, I had no problems using the trial version on 3 Win64 HomePremium machines and a Vista64 machine (only 2 at a time) using a combination of wired and wireless connections. (all Intel procs)

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