synchronizing audio over a network

Question

I\'m in startup of designing a client/server audio system which can stream audio arbitrarily over a network. One central server pumps out an audio stream and x number of clients

Answer 1

Check out the paper An Internet Protocol Sound System by Tom Blank of Microsoft Research. He solves the exact problem you are working on. His solution involves synchronizing the clocks across machines and using timestamps to let them each play at the same time. The downside of this approach is latency. To get all of the clocks synchronized requires stamping the time at the largest latency on the network.