Space Station Lambda

I’m currently visiting my family, and an inevitable part of it is playing some good old games with my brothers. The hardware situation here is a bit peculiar, though; I need to play on two different machines, and only one of them has speakers.

Those speakers are built-in, too, so I can’t change them easily.
No problem, there’s ESD, right? Well. The Enlightened Sound Daemon might have deserved its name when it was released, but since then a bunch of years have passed and it didn’t show acceptable quality when I tried it here.

PulseAudio to the rescue! This modern solution runs even on Microsoft Windows (although not on the 9x series, it seems), has dead simple GUI tools and is the best thing since sliced bread. A real sports car.
Except, for some unknown reason, I couldn’t get it to work on one of the machines in question. No sliced bread for me, I guess.

But then I came across a real slick solution in the ALSA wiki: a sound server using Netcat and the out-of-the-box ALSA utilities aplay and arecord.

Setup is as simple as:

# on the server:
nc -u -l -p 9999 | aplay
 
# on the client
arecord -t wav -f cd | nc -u SERVER 9999

Now just set your recording source via alsamixer -Vc to “Mix” and adjust the output volume levels on client, server and speaker.

Made me slap my head ’cause I didn’t think of it myself.

Comments(0)