Building an Awesome Sound System

One of the reasons I’ve not been writing here much lately has been us buying and moving to a new house (that and the crunch time to get BFBC2 shipped, in which I’ve ended up in a crucial role).

As we are finally getting a bit settled in (at least the living room is free of boxes now), I’ve started thinking about a new audio and video setup for the entire house.

One thing I’m missing about the apartment we moved out of is my sound system that covered the entire place — living room, bed room, kitchen, even bathroom. The whole thing was a DIY thing involving two amps, a partially broken speaker selector, lots of wiring and speakers everywhere. I could select what rooms I wanted music in, which was awesome, but it had its issues. One thing was that there was only one input, so if one of us watched a movie there was no way to listen to music in another room, another that… well, there was lots of wiring.

The house is a much larger space, and with it far longer wires to put up all over the place. I’m going to install a wired network that covers the place, but I’d rather not install any more wiring. Still, I’m going to want to send video signals from the digital TV box to the new TV in the bed room, which I might solve with a Slingbox PRO-HD and SlingCatcher, which seems like a cool combo with a bonus of access to my TV anywhere — if I can only figure out if it’ll work to remote control my box or not (my cable TV provider is probably Sweden’s most hated company not involved in public transport – com hem).

The audio setup is a different problem — I want a system which can play music from my media server in any room I’m in, can sync music in several rooms at once and which can also play audio from a separate input (like have the audio from a live music DVD on the PS3 on in several rooms at once). That last one seems to be tricky to pull off…

I’ve looked at several network media players, but most seem content at simply streaming media from a computer to a home entertainment system. Sonos S5 ZonePlayer seems like a popular geek choice, but sadly doesn’t do an external input (like my PS3).

The Logitech Squeezebox series seems to do (almost) what I want, but the component I’d need for the living room, a Squeezebox Transporter has some drawbacks. First of all, I can’t seem to figure out if it can stream its digital input out to other squeezeboxes — a make or break feature for me, but hardly mentioned out there on the ‘net. Second, the price tag! Holy crap, $1999? I’ll be upgrading my audio equipment, but I’m not really an audiophile of a class that needs that kind of equipment. It’d easily be the most expensive piece of equipment in the set.

I could even consider building my own system from scratch. It’d be kind of cool with a compact computer hidden away in each room, and a touch screen display system to interface with the thing. It’d probably end up cheaper than the Squeezebox option, but with a lot more work involved. Fun work, but frustrating at the moment as I don’t really have the time needed. If there’s a cheaper product out there which satisfies my three demands above, I’m a sale waiting to happen.

Do you know of any good network media player systems that fit the bill? Or do you have any experience with systems like that, good or bad? Please share any knowledge you have in the comments. I would also be happy to hear from anyone with experience of the Slingbox products.

Sunday Link Run

Lots of great stuff going on this week.

• Seth Godin has a commentary on Microsoft’s new initiative, Bing, that predictably is meant to be the next Google.
• And while on the subject of Google, they’re busy actually inventing new stuff: Google Wave, which looks extremely cool, and might completely take communications on the web to a new level. If you’ve got any kind of interest in web technology, watch their keynote demo — it’s an hour long, but well worth the time.
• Hanselman posts some interesting reflections on the result of Twitter becoming popular with marketers.
• The Messy Notebook has some advice on how to build something real in your spare time — it’s something I recommend to every programmer.
• Another event in the everlasting debate about piracy: A Canadian study has now been exposed as plagiarizing other reports, and of presenting numbers that were pure guesswork.
• If you’re into the Sci-Fi thing, check out this brain-controlled wheelchair. Human repairs are getting better and better.
• Some Battlefield 1943 news (boy, there’s lots of those): There’s a fourth map, Coral Sea, which will unlock with 43M total kills on each platform. And music4games has an article on the Abbey Road recording session for the soundtrack.
• I especially enjoyed this discussion on the BFBC2 multiplayer trailer, including a flamewar about whether the spotting system is cheating and a wallhack (hint: it’s not cheating if it’s the same for everyone).
• And time for another asshole of the week award, which is easily won by the Canon president who thinks there isn’t enough stress already — up your pace!

The Lyrics to my Life

Jeff Atwood posted a suggestion a while back for a “Support Your Favourite Small Software Vendor Day“. He has an interesting point, in that there’s a tendency to not register the shareware stuff out there. I’m as guilty as many others on this — I tend to not buy software that doesn’t do what I expect of it, keep looking for something better, but never find it.

Some of these are painfully apparent in my computer setup. I run dual-screen setups both at home (2560×1024) and at work (3200×1200), and I manage both with the excellent shareware application DisplayFusion. It has the unfortunate effect of being so good that I use it once, then forget about it for at least 3 months. Finding good backgrounds is easy on DeviantArt, though, and I’ve always had a soft spot for auto-rotating desktop backgrounds. Well, turns out DisplayFusion can do that in its registered (or “Pro”) version.

It has the rather sour licensing terms of “one computer only” however, so I’d need to buy two licenses. I find that rather greedy, to be honest — I never use both computers at once (they’re both stationaries, one at home and one at work), and while I certainly find the application worth the money, I don’t fancy paying for the same thing twice, for the same reason I don’t think people should be restricted to installing Spore on 3 computers, as long as they’re only playing on one at a time.

If you’re a small developer trying to make money off shareware applications, I’d advice you to not try to put MS/EA-style restrictive licenses on them. There’s just no point, and while EA may be able to take the hit of being despised by every forum flameboy around, you can’t. The likely effect is that you lose sales rather than gain additional ones. Result in this case: I’m looking for another good dual-monitor wallpaper application to buy instead.

Another app I’ve used for a long time is Minilyrics. I’m an absolute music junkie, tend to be listening to various kinds of music more or less constantly. I’ve always been interested in lyrics viewing addons, but fell completely in love when I found Minilyrics. The difference is the amount of config you can do with Minilyrics.

Most lyrics viewers scroll down text in a window — Minilyrics defaults to this as well. This takes up a chunk of screen space, and as I mentioned I like to have my music on a bit more often than always, or a bit more often than that. But with Minilyrics I can set it to scroll horizontally, and place the app as a small strip just about anywhere. At work I basically always run Visual Studio maximized on my primary monitor, so I’ve ended up with a setup with Minilyrics layered transparently on top of the title bar.

Minilyrics on top of visual studio's title bar

I love that setup — it keeps the lyrics where there’s always an unused bit of screen space, and it’s always easy to check out whatever those words that just floated by in the headphones were, without taking focus away from what I’m doing. It doesn’t look like much on a still image like that, but seeing the words scroll by is awesome.

At home I don’t have the luxury of a single app always running in maximized mode though. I’ve grappled with that for a while, and ultimately came up with my current setup, which has Minilyrics running at the bottom of my second monitor, in a reserved space (so I have a lyrics bar on my second monitor, just like you’ll have the task bar on your primary monitor).

Minilyrics at the bottom of my second screen

I haven’t been able to find any applications that properly put up a bar like that on a second monitor, so I ended up writing a very small application only for the purpose of reserving that space with a transparent window. It took me a while to figure that one out — most application I’ve seen with the capability to dock in like that with the edge of a screen calls it “docking” — Microsoft terminology calls it “Application Desktop Toolbar” (thanks, Stack Overflow folks). Once I knew what to search for to get the information I needed, writing the app was quick and painless.

Anyway Minilyrics had some very annoying bugs, but I still kept using it. And the latest version has fixed nearly everything that annoyed me — so it was well worth the money.

To end the whole theme of music: I guess anyone who can identify both songs has a suitably wicked musical taste to be compatible with mine.

What shareware do you use?