sysblogd

… a day dream that was. I was walking through my flat listening to music of my favourite kind. Well, tell me something new you might think. Here it comes: Each time I walked from one room to another the music speakers in the next room would be activated by the N95 (or any other Upnp aware device) playing the music. So the music would only be played in that sorounding I was in. Of course the music was not locally stored on the N95 but came via Upnp (or whatever) from my file storage via ether.

That’s not so unrealistic as I thought at first. I vaguely remember reading about a sound system that can address all present speakers individually via remote control even. That, of course must have been centrally controlled, though, and should have been proprietary, i.e. only working of all hardware comes from the same manufacturer. But how about if that worked via Upnp (or anything the like)? I guess the tricky bit would be the hand over of the signals transporting the sound information, i.e. manage gapless playback as if everything was wired and feed by broadcasting the sound to the speakers. Of course the speakers most likely would have to support some kind of wireless technique that the signal could be transmitted by.

Also, some mode that does address each speaker individually should be implemented, regulating the sound volume for each box (or at least each room) so the toilette is not blasted away… But I guess that would be rather easy and does not even need a modulated infrastructure as needed for the “sound hand over” scenario described above. What a cockaigne world it would be to have an abstract layer every manufacturer sticks to and supports to handle “cross-platform-interaction” like needed here. Well, I’m looking forward to building that cockaigne and living in it. How about you?

What would be even greater to have a stationary player, say in the living room, controlled via, eg. Upnp, but still be able to have the hand over working, i.e. have the system notice where the sound should be played in which volume. Another attempt could be some kind of tracker that knows where the person listening to the music is sojourning. I don’t think that would be the best approach since most likely it needs complex structures. Plus I can’t think of a way to keep that tracker “inter-platformly” scalable for many scenarios and systems.

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Tags: upnp