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[tjobbins]

Hi all,

Does anyone have any clever way of routing the output of Media Center into the input of Winamp?

Why?  Cos I can't live without Milkdrop visualisations in Winamp, but I also can't live without Media Center for organising and controlling my music.  

So what I'd love to do is have MC as the library, then when I select play, the audio is routed from MC into Winamp which plays it as a stream.  I would control the music with Play/Pause/Next etc in MC, and run and control the visualisations in Winamp.

There's a Line In plugin for Winamp, so I hoped there was some way I could tell that to listen on the outputs configured in MC - but no luck there.  

I have an Echo Layla pro soundcard, with 8 inputs and 10 outputs.  I *could* just connect, say, outputs 1-2 into inputs 3 and 4, and get MC to play to the former, Winamp to listen on the latter.  But then it would go through an unnessary D-A and A-D step, which I'd like to avoid if at all possible.

Anyone know of any tools that might link up the two programs without sacrificing any quality?


Thanks


Tom

[MGD_King]

Tom, I don't think it's going to work the way you want it to. The only thing you can do is set Winamp to broadcast from the soundcard, and then you can play everything through MC. However, that pretty much renders Winamp useless when streaming as it doesn't broadcast the track info, nor will you be able to use Winamp's controls (play, pause, etc.) and therefore  you won't be able to use Winamp's visualization.

[tjobbins]

Thanks for the reply MGD

Could you elaborate on 'broadcast from the soundcard' - how does that work?  Which input plugin do I use in Winamp?

So far as I can see, as long as Winamp is 'playing', visualisations work.  I.e. if I configure it to use the Line In plugin, and hit play, visualisations work - even if Line In is listening to inputs that are playing nothing.   Would that work with the broadcast option?

I dont mind about track info - I just want Milkdrop to display visualisations that are in time to the music;  i.e. Winamp needs to be a passthrough for the audio signal alone.

[MGD_King]

Tom,

Winamp will be a "pass through" but, like I said, you won't be able to use any of the controls or the visualizations

As for the sound card broadcasting method, I'll look tonight (I'm at work now) and see what I can find out. I know that there's a setting for it, I just can't remember where it is. Send me an e-mail at "mediaguy @ mgdking . com" (no parenthesis or spaces) and I'll send you a screen shot of where the setting is.

[xen-uno]

In MC, set up WinAmp as an external program...

MC>Tools>Send To>Send To (external)>Add/edit programs>add WinAmp as an external app

From there you can send ANYTHING (individ tracks/view schemes/playlists/smartlists/etc) to WA via select & right click>Send To>Send To (external)>WinAmp. Works amazingly well.

10^-27

[fex]

It really is a "pass through". Did a setup to stream (or broadcast?) audio to an external unit. Not an easy setup, needs Winamp 2x (not 3).

More infos here for the moment:

http://www.shoutcast.com/support/docs/

[fex]

xen-uno

Why did'nt you tell me this before?

Thanks!

Edit: But don't works, if you want fo remote MC... (via handheld and wireless in my case).

[xen-uno]

I missed the "streaming audio" part of the thread title...in a couple links I tried sending to WA...no dice. But it does work well for everything else.

10^-27

edit: Fex...is the Send To option available remotely? It should work...

[hit_ny]

Edit: But don't works, if you want remote MC...

Why not ?

HaveMC on the client pass the same to winamp.

You have MC as the client so u can remote control the server.

[fex]

hit_ny

How do you send a track via 'remote MC' to an external app? Did I miss something?

xen-uno

No. I use NetRemote on my handheld. I would like to choose a track (or album) over my (MC-)server. The server should stream it to my hardware (not a PC) in the living room. The only solution I found so far was to 'broadcast' (Shoutcast and Winamp over soundcard).

[tjobbins]

Fex,

Thanks for the info.   I had a look at the shoutcast thing, but it seems it can only broadcast from Winamp: "broadcasters use Winamp and a plug-in called the SHOUTcast Source for Winamp Plug-In to send audio from Winamp to the SHOUTcast server."

How do I broadcast through Shoutcast from MC?

Also I saw in the shoutcast docs that it only supports MP3 - would I not be able to use this for playing lossless APEs from MC to Winamp?

Thanks very much


Tom

[xen-uno]

If I understand your ape question correctly...

You wouldn't be able to broadcast apes with anything short of a T1 line (on both ends). Application to application on same machine is do-able. Machine to machine on a LAN is also. Beyond that, apes are out of the question.

10^-27

[tjobbins]

xen-

I actually just need to broadcast within the same machine   I.e. the machine storing the APEs is the same machine as playing the APEs.  So bandwidth isn't an issue.

I guess the whole 'broadcast' thing has confused the issue;  I am not actually wanting to broadcast audio to different or multiple machines.  All I want is for Winamp to play music provided by Media Center, so that I can use Winamp visualisations.

I'm going to try tonight the Send To External option, and also MGDKing's Shoutcast broadcast option.   Thanks for all your help guys


Tom