Use laptop as an external sound card

Question

I'm interested in audio mixing and want to try to be a disc jockey.

I downloaded Mixxx to mix different tracks, but to do it the best I should have two separate audio outputs to play headphone and speakers independently.

I have no special sound card with two outputs, but have two laptops (running Ubuntu 12.04 and Mint 15) and want to connect the laptops together to play one stream on the first laptop and another stream at second. In other words, I want the second laptop to show up as an audio output to the first.

Is this possible? If so, how?

Answer 1

If both machines use PulseAudio for sound and have Avahi running, then they can automatically detect each other's audio hardware.

Turn publishing and discovery on in the paprefs tool; you might also need to copy one machine's ~/.pulse-cookie file (or ~/.config/pulse/cookie) to the other one.

Afterwards, opening the system sound settings (e.g. pavucontrol or gnome-control-center) should display network outputs next to local ones.

Make sure you have a fast connection though (e.g. Gigabit Ethernet or similar), since the audio data is uncompressed.