How to route audio from a Mac's built-in mic over a network?

April 1, 2006 9:29 AM

Is it possible to route audio from a Mac's built-in mic (or other audio source) over a network to another machine in mostly-realtime? If so, how?

Assume both machines have modern, fast ethernet connections. Bonus points for solutions that don't require keeping an application in the foreground -- the user should be able to keep working in other applications with the audio transfer happening as unobtrusively as possible. Terminal/UNIX wizardry is fine, but the command to invoke it and turn it off should be simple.

posted by namespan to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Depending on what format you want the audio to arrive in, there's Nicecast, which is pretty turnkey if all you want to do is stream to an audio player like iTunes or WinAmp. It sits in the background and doesn't do much once it's up and running.
posted by mph at 9:37 AM on April 1, 2006

Assuming it's OSX, use the power of unix and do cat /dev/dsp | ssh [hostname] 'cat > /dev/dsp'. Adjust the audio device as necessary, you could pipe through compression or resampling tools if you want to cut down on bandwidth.
posted by fvw at 10:29 AM on April 1, 2006

I'm not sure if this is what you're going for, but I've done this with iChat at a conference. A colleague wasn't able to attend the session in person, so I sat close to the front and fired up iChat AV. He listened in at his office and took part in the backchannel text-chat. Kind of a duct-tape solution, but it worked very, very well for our purposes.
posted by aladfar at 1:26 PM on April 1, 2006

Yeah, the Bonjour mode in iChat will do this really well, unless you have some other requirements you haven't mentioned.

On the listening Mac, enter:

default write com.apple.ichat AutoAcceptACInvitations 1

at the command line. This will allow you to iniatiate chats solely from your end. You might also want to set it to ignore people that aren't on the listening Mac's buddy list, so you're the only one who can listen in.
posted by cillit bang at 4:40 PM on April 1, 2006