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[funkathustra]

If I link two zones together, when I begin playback from my computer, I hear the song momentarily from the other zone, and then MC on my computer locks up for several seconds, and then playback begins fine, with good synchronicity. However, at the end of the track, before the next track begins, the delay/lock-up happens again on my computer, but this time, while the other zone starts playback immediately. The two zones are no longer synchronized.

These are both reasonably-powerful desktop computers on a gigabit network.

Any ideas what's causing this lock-up?

I'm running version 18.0.106 on Windows 7.

[dtc]

By networked zones, do you mean using the library server between two systems (Tremote)  and then creating  a zone containing outputs on both the client and the server? That is, does the zone contain "There" and a Player on the local system? If so, my experience is that syncing is a problem in that situation. I know Matt worked on it early on in version 18, but I still had sync problems. Not sure if anything has been done since. I, unfortunately, gave up on linking zones in a client/server situation because of the sync issues. I would be happy to know if anyone has got this to work well, with good syncing.

[funkathustra]

Yes, that's what I'm talking about. Anyone else have any tips to get it working?

I'd love to toss a few Atom-based thin clients running MC around my house to do whole-house audio over TCP/IP.

[csimon]

I know it goes against the grain! But have you thought about distribution of the audio itself rather than distribution of the players? Should be less expensive too!

For example, take line-level audio from a central PC and feed it into an audio distribution amplifier, and cable audio into each room? Or a wireless audio transmitter such as the Marmitek Audio Anywhere? Or even an IP-based audio transmitter if there is one available (I did see one but it was rather expensive...).

There still appears to be lots of problems synching audio on discrete pieces of equipment, without going for a less-flexible proprietary system like Sonos or Squeeze.

If you sometimes need independent audio in each zone then I guess one approach is a multi-channel sound card that you can address individually in MC as discrete stereo pairs. Linking and synching those stereo pairs (which would be zones on the same sound card) should be more reliable than trying to synch sound cards on remote PCs. Or rather than linking them, feed their output into an audio matrix switch so that you can easily switch each room to any of the individual outputs.

Just throwing a few ideas around!

[dtc]

I do not know for sure, but I think that zones were originally meant to work with multiple outputs on the same computer and that doing it on separate systems was not a real design goal. As I said, Matt worked on it a little bit in early versions of version 18, but my guess is it is not a high priority. The stuttering at the start and the lack of sync seem like they could be solved. There is an option to slow down or speed up one signal versus the other when playing linked zones, but I never found that it would keep things in sync well enough to allow me to go from room to room without a noticeable difference when using separate PCs.  It would be fine in completely separate rooms (except for the stutter) but I never got them to work seamlessly when you had the potential to hear both.

[DwestSeattle]

I had the same difficulty getting audio sync to work well in client/server setup.  I would imagine having multiple audio outputs on a single computer being distributed about the house would work better, but that involves more expense and work for those of us who already have computers and amps in a couple different rooms.