/scream

Virtual network sound card for Microsoft Windows

Primary LanguageC++

Scream - Virtual network sound card for Microsoft Windows

Scream is a virtual device driver for Windows that provides a discrete sound device. Audio played through this device is published on your local network as a PCM multicast stream.

Receivers on the network can pick up the stream and play it through their own audio outputs. A simple server for Linux (interfacing with PulseAudio) is provided.

Scream is based on Microsoft's MSVAD audio driver sample code.

Download and install

A ZIP file containing a signed x64 build is available on the GitHub releases page. The "installer" is a batch file that needs to be run with administrator rights.

The build is supposed to run on all x64 versions of Windows 7 through Windows 10.

Usage

All audio played through the Scream device will be put onto the local LAN as a multicast stream. The multicast target address and port is always "239.255.77.77:4010". The audio is a raw PCM stream, always 44100kHz, 16bit, stereo. It is transferred in UDP frames with a payload size of max. 882 bytes, representing 1/200 second of audio. Delay is minimal, since all processing is done on kernel level.

Receivers simply need to read the stream off the network and stuff it into a local audio sink. The receiver system's kernel should automatically do the necessary IGMP signalling, so it's usually sufficient to just open a multicast listen socket and start reading from it. Minimal buffering (~ 4 times the UDP payload size) should be done to account for minimal jitter. A small receiver for Linux/Pulseaudio is provided in the source tree. It can be run as an unpriviledged user.

Building

VS2013 and WDK are required. You might also have luck with earlier (or future) VS versions, but I didn't test that.