I've heard conflicting information on whether or not 802.11b wireless connectivity will allow me to listen to FLACs stored on a separate machine on my home network. Although the spec indicates something on the order of 12 mb/s transfer rate, 1 mb/s might be more likely - and since FLACs tend to be on the order of 1 mb/s, I might not be able to do it.

My goal is to use my existing PC (upgraded for storage, etc) as a file server, and have a mini PC of some kind next to my receiver with a digital out option (soundcard or USB2Digi). I'd like to mount the fileserver drives on the mini PC, and simply play the FLACs on the hifi, with an interface on the TV.

My question is: can this be done with wireless? I'm open to all sorts of regular networking options as well, like the power line or telephone line networks, if those can handle the bandwidth. The mini PC will be approx 50 feet from the server, through a number of walls.

Thanks for your assistance.

--Cerebus

Hi,

In practice 11Mbps 802.11b is okay, even for uncompressed cd sound.

When transferring files I get about 250 kBytes/s, which would be enough for about 3 FLAC streams in parallel.

If you're afraid, just go 22Mbps and you'll be safe.

Regards

Just a clarification...
When talking about data transmission, the units usually used are in bits, not in bytes, so 12Mb/s is 12Mbits/s (or Mibi/s or Mbauds/s , whatever you like better ).

And that means 1.5MBytes/s .

Since a CD-Quality wave file is 1441Mbits/s (or 172Kbytes/s) , you clearly have more than enough bandwidth to spare, to play your FLAC's.

No, I wouldn't play FLAC over WLAN. The bandwidth isn't much of a problem, but the latency is. Even playing MPC over WLAN sucks, and I stopped doing it a while ago and just copied it all onto my notebook. MPC would skip sometimes, and full-file buffering caused a several second delay between files.

Hi, first post after a significant amount of lurking.

After moving house I had similar ideas about setting up a wireless network to stream audio. The distance between my PC and hifi is probably around 60 feet. I was tempted to buy a small quiet PC such as the Tranquil PC http://www.tranquilpc.co.uk/ and stream to it from my music server. In the end I couldn't justify the expense.

I eventually went with running reasonable quality audio cable (20 meters) from an M-Audio Audophile USB Sound Card (very good) to my amp. The sound quality is very good. I'm using a Netgear DSL Wireless Router and Wi-Fi enabled PDA for control and track selection. The PDA calls up a web interface which controls Winamp using the httpQ plugin.

All in all it works very well.

Good luck

Dave

The numbers may say it will work but I have to agree Chun-Yu. Sometimes 320kbit mp3's will skip on my laptop, I don't think 802.11b is that good of a choice, especially since you have a number of walls and a bit of distance to go. You may have better luck with 802.11g, not sure haven't tried it. I vote for running some Cat-5e and not having to worry.

Yeah, 802.11g isn't really all that interesting either - my old Dell had a/b/g, but I didn't bother with it on my new IBM since it isn't all that great. It definitely isn't anywhere close to 54 Mbps in reality. I still think it would skip over a g network, but I never actually did try it.

I'm playing streamed divx with videolan on my laptop with a 802.11b link without any frame skip. Flac should work perfectly.

Argh! Can I get someone to try this for me? If you have some flacs on a drive on your network: mount that drive on the other machine, and play them in another part of your house, say three rooms over, or up/downstairs.

K, I'll give it a try later when I get home.

It works like that. There are also those other options but that is the easiest way.

But does it skip at all? I just want to know if there's issues with the playback over 802.11b.

I could update my D-Link 614 router and DWL 650 PCMCIA card to 44 MBps recently, just by applying a firmware upgrade.

Of course, real life transmission is far away from that number, but i can easily play MKV and AVI DivX files with a 720 x 432 resolution and a pretty high bitrate ( max. 6000 kbps video + 200 kbps audio ) via my WLAN, and without any skipping ...

EDIT : I once tested DVD playback i now remember, as my new company laptop has a CD-RW but no DVD playback ... didnt work, as expected ( max. bitrate for DVD MPEG2 video can exceed 20,000 kbps IIRC ... )

EDIT2 : Maybe the reason why this works fine, while your FLAC files are skipping, is that the FLAC player doesnt buffer enough ? DirectShow buffers a lot by default, and if i play movies on my PC this is all done via DirectShow.

While there is a FLAC decoder existing meanwhile ( CoreFLAC made by Toff ), its unfortunately not coming with a FLAC file source filter, so it cant be used on FLAC files but only on FLAC from MKA or Ogg. But TCMP is coming by default with a CCAS FLAC playback plugin to play FLAC files from either HTTP, HDD or CD, and it uses DirectShow also as underlying platform. You may try to play your FLAC files with TCMP, maybe this does work, i cant test right now as i am in China and not at home ....

I play FLACs over 802.11b all the time, and I've never had any problems.