So yesterday afternoon I spent a few hours chatting with a mate of mine, Tim from One Inch Pixel, in regards to the perfect streaming setup.

Before I get into the our failed attempts let me first describe my setup and my requirements.

I have three main areas of my network in my house:

• My Loungeroom with my Home Theatre PC running Windows XP MCE 2005 connected to the network via WiFi, my Xbox 360 and my Wii.
• My Study with my PC, my girlfriends PC and my Windows Home Server.
• My Bedroom with my modded Xbox running Xbox Media Center connected to the network via WiFi

Each area has a good stereo system connected to at least one of the machines and each is able to play my music library that is stored on the Windows Home Server via the network.

However what I want is for each stereo to be playing the exact same thing, I don't want to walk down the house and have each stereo playing a different song, nor do I want to have each stereo playing the same song but not in sync.

Another requirement is that the application/server streaming the music over the network must be running of my Windows Home Server (WHS) and must not require any manual interaction with Windows as WHS is a headless server. Ideally the application should have a webserver for controlling the music being played.

I actually started playing around with this task a few days back, but spent a lot of time talking with Tim last night trying to find a solution. So far these are the major application that I have tested and the results:

• SHOUTCast w/Winamp
  This was my first idea and would probably have been a perfect solution were it not for the unfortunate method that it runs.

  Unfortunately SHOUTCast requires both a SHOUTCast server, which I setup on the WHS, and a DJ which runs through Winamp and the machine with the music. Basically this means that I would have to have not only my WHS machine on at all times but another machine to send the music to WHS.

• SlimServer
  This was the first program that Tim sent me, and at first it looked very promising. By default it ran as a service on the WHS and it offered a Web frontend to control the music.

  Again it had problems, for some bizarre reason it does not offer the ability to send a single stream over all devices connected to it, it would just use separate playlists for each. Doesn't make much sense for me as each machine can already have its own playlist.

  We also tried an addon that was supposed to sync the playlists, but all it really did was point the clients to one playlist instead of one stream, so over a small period of time one client would be playing a different section of the song than the other client was.

We also tried a few other apps, none worth mentioning, and had zero luck meeting my requirements.

The search however is not over, I will still attempt to find a solution to this as it just doesn't make sense that nothing will do exactly what I want. It's not as if I'm asking too much.