HouseBot

I am trying to get an understanding of how I can use Housebot to control a whole house audio system. I would like to be able to send 4 to 6 sources including mp3s, cd, XM to any or all of 4 to 6 zones. What sort of hardware and plug-ins or programming is required to do this? I would love to hear examples of what others have done to achieve this.



Thanks for the help,



Geoff

Much I like HouseBot and promote its use, what you are askig for it better served by a dedicated audio distribution box. These hardware devices are functional switch boxes that do exactly what you are asking for.



Google for audio distribution amplifiers

I was actually wondering if there was a way to implement a system similar to what Premise offers. A matrix switcher is controlled by the software and allows any zone to play any available source simultaneously. Mulitple sound cards can be used to send mp3s or internet radio to different zones and can be controlled independently on remote touch screens. Is this something housebot can do. It looks like and an audio distribution amp can only handle one source at a time.



Thanks,



Geoff

The Russound Cav6.6 has 6 A/V inputs & 6 A/V ouputs and can be controlled by a serial connection. Problems: composite video output & cost ($$)



http://www.russound.com

Geoff,

Being in the biz "Home automation, and home audio", I would have to say what you are trying to do would probably be a bad idea. PC's are not good for what you want to do. Otherwise we'd be selling them by the boatload. If you want whole house audio for a decent price, check out Niles audio or Matrix. If you want MP3/Lossless audio, check out ReQuest Multimedia's Audio request, or the Arrakis system. I've been trying (and continue) to try to find a way to implement media PC's for use in these situations, and it just hasn't panned out yet. The bottom line is it just isn't user friendly.

McNasty,



I'm interested in what you say about user-friendliness and would appreciate it if you could say a little more. Do you mean that you just haven't seen a simple enough GUI yet on a PC, that the whole (Windows or other) operating system of a PC is just too complicated, that the pointing devices don't seem to be best suited for a PC or that the job of networking the home is too much hassle for the average consumer? Or maybe all of the above.



I ask as someone who has been trying for the last year or so to sort out my own home audio, gaining some small victories along the way but without ever feeling that I've quite got it the way I want. Every so often I look at non-PC multi-room audio/video, but the magazines always seem to be full of solutions aimed at wealthy audiophiles or at least people with more money than sense.

On AVSForum, there is a guy with the screen name Mastiff that has a PC based multi zone/multi input system. He has a link in his signature to his web site that goes into pretty good detail. You might like to look at it. I'd link, but it is just too late to do it tonight. If you can't find it, let me know and I'll get it for you, but he should be pretty easy to find.

Check out the M-Audio 410, or it's bigger brother.



Command Cubes http://www.commandcubes.com has software that will control its four zoned outputs.

or, take a little from the command cubes forums, a little from the xlobby forums, add a few winamp plugins and sound cards and voila!



2 zone multisource pc...or at least that's how I did it, though in all fairness, it's not for the weak of heart. It was done as an experiment to disprove just the kind of nonsense we keep hearing about how you can't do that. The good news is that it's stable as all hell (on a 450 mhz PII, no less), and I'm planning on upgrading it to 4-5 zone, 6 source preamp in the very near future and finally getting rid of that horrible elan z630 and keypads....hello 10" touchscreens in every room (i.e. back to plan A..)



now if we could just slim the housebot remote app to work decently on a 100 mhz '486 on win98, I'd take back all of the horrible things I said in that other thread.



erie



(who is also 'in the business', albeit part time due to other business concerns)



also, McNasty, et. al., check out some of the rs232 control plugins for winamp, web based control plugins, and some of the line in plugins. Combined, they're pretty good and usable right now, does the ReQuest or Arrakis support flac or shorten files? ogg? ape? any of the other common lossless formats? Winamp does, seamlessly. I really don't know much about either of these, as the pricetag is close to what I'd consider silly for my needs when I have perfectly good computers sitting in the corner waiting for an excuse to use them...

Exactly....



The M-Audio 410 just simplifies it somewhat as it is a single slot four output sound card, and command cubes can individually control all four outputs with four seperate Winamp instances.

Check out http://www.hacs.com for a newat speaker switcher controlled via RS232, X10 or IR. You could easily create a plug-in for it.