Pulseaudio can handle this to some extents without too much work, but careful, the networking and other encroaching processes will cause the real-time nature to be quirky.  I used to do this to some extent of success, using my ubuntu media server to stream audio from other hosts at it via multicast or unicast.  Tends to stutter by default as a habit, but at the time I *was* using it on a 400mhz ppc imac with ubuntu as the player source.  What could go wrong.

Some audio chips are better than others too, ymmv there.

Best thing is a dedicated box doing little else, but pulse with their rtp sink can do much of this, but you'll need to tweak with it some, giving it a real-time kernel, setting the priority of the devices, processes, setting pulse to do rt, etc.

There are some people working around things like this on a raspberry pi with some of their spi audio chips that don't suck like the built-in ones.  Have to use real-time on those, but it works it seems.  Was going to do this for using pi's in audio distribution around my house as a pet project.

Pulse is pretty cool for that, I use pavucontrol to mux streams with it.  You can do some interesting things patching like with jack actually if you toggle a few options, like exposing monitor sinks.  I have some security camers with 2 way audio on them, but use a horrid active-x based interface to use it.  I redirect the mic audio sink of the xp box pulse to a monitor of the output of my audio card, so I'll stream music that way around the house for giggles, and annoy my birds back.

-mb


On 09/08/2015 02:41 PM, Shawn Badger wrote: