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Comment by dangwu | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, what's your use case?

I have a nice pair of wired headphones and I listen to a lot of lossless audio. I like being able to get up from my desk to fill up my water glass or grab a snack without breaking the flow of music. Bluetooth isn't ideal due to the quality loss and other factors. I tried some airplay based solutions but the 2 second delay was too much. I'm seeing anywhere from 25ms-200ms latency here and it's working flawlessly.

I could just listen to music on my phone directly, but it becomes such a pain because watching a YouTube video or anything with audio on my computer completely breaks my flow.

Granted this is a completely niche persnickety problem, but what is this site if not for solving niche persnickety problems.

My friend who happens to be an acclaimed tubist just noted that he could use this for online music lessons. So there's earnestly a wide variety of use cases here.

For what it's worth, I have the exact same use case

Have you given snapcast a look? https://github.com/badaix/snapcast/

> Granted this is a completely niche persnickety problem

I'm in the exact same boat - completely resonate with your desire to avoid breaking flow - and I doubt I would have thought of this solution if it weren't for your post above.

Thanks.

I can't figure out how latency matters when you're listening to prerecorded music. You hear the whole song from start to finish without interruption, yes? Why does it matter if that whole uninterrupted song is heard 2 seconds later than when it was sent from the streaming device? Oh... you're watching the music video at the same time?

Perhaps it is a usability issue. Low latency makes using the software much more pleasant. I once tried streaming lossless audio to my phone from an mpd running on my home server. Pressing pause and having to wait two seconds for the audio to actually pause killed it for me.

That’s a fair question, but I do a lot more than just listen to music. I jump on a call, I watch a YouTube video, I put on a basketball game or even the news. Those are all latency sensitive.

Why does latency matter for any of these except the call where you're interacting with the stream?

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