Why does an MD need multiple audio player SW instances running? Are you using a single MD to route different audio streams each to multiple rooms?
That is what I envision.
Seems to me that what's needed is the Core running multiple audio servers, streaming audio data packets to whichever MD requests each stream.
That would be great _IF_ I wanted to have MDs for each zone, but I don't. Not sure if that is the intention of the other posters however.
I believe the SlimServer can already do that. If you want to use Xine to play the audio stream to the MD soundcard, you need to add to the Xine wrapper code that starts up the SlimServer and requests from it. Or make a DCE wrapper for the SoftSqueeze that offers that control and requesting.
If only I knew how to do that, perhaps that would get us somewhere...as long as the MD could play three or more sources at the same time without three different hardware MDs.
Actually my original thought was to use Squeezbox units for each desired music input to the multi-zone amplifier. I decided that it would be cleaner if this could be integrated into LMCE somehow.
My particular systems would have only a keypad in the zones where video is unnecessary. This way there is not a requirement to have more hardware than is required, yet still retaining the master control, from rooms or zones with MDs, with information about what content is playing in those rooms or zones which do not contain a true MD. Thus, one could redirect content and maintain zone status, etc. from a MD outside the keypad system while also having the ability to change content from a keypad (uber-thin-client). My intention would be to have the capability to replace the music server, which is Windows only, with LMCE core or MD.
The new NuVo system named Essentia is EnergyStar compliant, so one would suppose this would be a better option than having multiple MDs (12 or more) to control said zones. Especially by the time you add televisions, monitors, remotes, etc. to each zone.
Hope that was clear as mud. I'll read this again tomorrow and see if I made any sense to myself.
Jason