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[MusicHawk]

The new Linksys Wireless Media Bridge WMB54G is a wonderfully simple solution to a big need -- sending audio from Media Center to a stereo amp across the room or even across the house. I'm already coming up with reasons to buy several!

Rather than try to PULL the audio files from MC via UPnP as "media players" such as Netgear MP101NA do, this Linksys system PUSHES the audio output via the Windows sound driver to a remote device that connects to the stereo amp. The connection can be wired Ethernet or Wi-Fi 802.11g. In my house it works fine, sounds good, and doesn't seem to have any cranky network/interface problems.

However, MC 11.1.121 doesn't seem to work with the output switching feature of the Linksys WMB54G, done via a little system tray icon that selects either the PC's speakers or the remote WMB as the audio destination.

In my experiments on multiple PCs, MC ignores the on-the-fly audio output switching done by the Wireless Media Bridge, while other Windows audio sources I tried DO make the switch on-the-fly. It seems that MC 11 locks onto the audio driver that is active when MC is started, and ignores any dynamic change of the audio driver. The only workaround I found is to restart MC after each driver switch.

I'm hoping there's an option I overlooked in MC 11 that can support dynamic driver switching but if not, I'm hoping the JRiver wizards can devise a solution.

-- John

[yap]

WMB54G, works fine with MC11 as I have it running in a remote zone configuration. Setup a remote zone in MC and select WMB54G sound card as the output device in zone manager, with this you don't need to switch between local PC sound and remote zone sound.

I can play music in local and remote zone without any problem.

 The WMB54G setup only supports one player (it only creates one virtual sound card for WMB54), I am waiting for someone to come with a work around to get multiple media bridges to work from a single PC, this solution with MC and Netremote will create perfect multi-zone music solution.

[datdude]

This is highly inconvenient for switching zones. 

First you have to control the linksys utility AND then tell MC to switch zones which doesn't kill the other zone either and you have to stop playing so there are several things that are very clunky in this setup with MC and linksys.

I know JimH is using one, so hopefully he will let us know what he thinks either way.

[JimH]

Here's the thread I started:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=31892.0

[yap]

may be I don't understand the issues you guys are having but,

When I want to listen from local pc speakers I just play music on zone1 and when I want to listen anything on remote speakers I select zone2. All my PC sound still work on the local machine without any switching in in media bridge software.

Another thing I found is that once I finish listening I hibernate my PC and when the PC come back up, the media bridge connects automatically so no need to detect and connect the bridge via linksys utility.