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I'm investigating low-budget ways to get audio from my PC (Ubuntu) to HiFi without wires. I'm currently testing a setup where Asus WL-500gP wireless router runs ESD daemon and has attached USB soundcard which is then plugged into HiFi.

I'm testing playback on PC with mpg123-esd and Spotify under Wine. The sound is there, latency is unexpectedly low, but I also hear occassional clicks and some distortion from time to time. I suppose that's because of the low latency and wireless streaming of uncompressed audio--any packet drops, CPU temporarily being busy etc. will cause clicks in sound output.

Is there a way around this problem, increasing latency / buffer size somehow perhaps?

Streaming using shoutcast protocol seems to be a way out but I have feeling that would be a complex and brittle setup.

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I tried that around two years ago. I remember I had more luck with pulseaudio than with esound (which already wasn't actively developed), it is much more configurable (and much more complex!)... still it was barely working (no stream compression and my uplink was not very good). I don't remember the details of that setup now.

Now pulseaudio seems to support more protocols (RTP seems promising, as it should handle packet drops properly), so it might (or might not) work better.

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+1 for PulseAudio for this task - but only if PulseAudio is a recent enough release! –  Janne Pikkarainen Sep 10 '10 at 12:59
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