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Is there any way to stream all audio from my (Windows) PC to my phone via Wifi, so that my phone acts like a sound card? I basically want to use my phone with my headphones as wireless headphones.

It looks like Remote Audio does this, but it is only for Linux.

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I have experimented with streaming audio from PC to Android over Bluetooth. Recent versions of BlueZ are able to sink an A2DP stream, but the build I have on my phone (Droid running Sapphire 2.0.2) is outdated and won't do it. You may have better luck.

If that won't work, Android's media player may be able to receive one of the streaming protocols that VLC supports. Another poster may know more about this.

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Think of it from another point of view: what do you want to listen to? Using Wifi I doubt that it is possible to acheive a latency suitable for games or movies. I have a BT A2DP connector on my stereo and even that does not provide enough speed to play movies properly.

This leaves us with music. Then it is in almost every case more useful to play it on the phone, not on the computer and stream the result. What you are looking for, then is a DLNA player on the phone. There are some on the market. Depending on your Windows version, a DLNA server will already be built in.

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You can check out Soundwire, there is a paid and free version so you can choose which one of them suits your need by checking out the description.

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  • High latency, 2 secs or more.
    – Codebeat
    Aug 2, 2020 at 19:51
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CNET has great video here that explains how to do exactly what you want.

Use Skifta, and you can stream from your PC to your phone.

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  • From what I can see, this is not what I was looking for. I don't want to access my computer's media library but stream audio from arbitrary applications. Also it works by sending everything via Skifta's servers and I'd rather avoid that.
    – Nova
    Apr 15, 2012 at 19:03
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    In Tschareck's defense, Skifta uses one of the only standards you'll find for accomplishing what you're after: uPnp. Using Skifta (on your phone) and a uPnp Control Point you should be able to play music from any of your devices (including your PC) on your phone. I think this is the best you'll find so far for playing audio through your phone. As far as I know, this does not require a Skifta account and, unless you want to stream over the internet, will transfer media from device to device and not through Skifta's servers.
    – ctt
    Apr 16, 2012 at 2:09
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I basically want to use my phone with my headphones as wireless headphones

Instead of one application, I have found more convenient to use two parallel apps, one for controlling the PC from Android phone and the other for sending all PC sound to the phone at the same time:

  1. keep the actual playing on the PC (use PC-OS instead of Android to process the media files)
  2. remote-control the playing with the Android phone (depending on the player: controlling Foobar2000 with FoobarCon (and FoobarCon component setup), Clementine with Clementine remote and VLC with VLC Mobile Remote - PC & Mac)
  3. send all sound to Android with the SoundWire server that should run on the PC: it is to be found here (the Windows package worked great for me but for whatever reason the Linux one did not: the one that worked for me is this (also uploaded here)). The Android app is SoundWire free.

In order to hear only the sound coming from Android:

  • in Windows: muting the laptop speakers from the dedicated key or the external speakers keeps the Android sound

  • in Linux the same key mutes all sounds, including Android. So, open Pulse Audio Volume Control (pavucontrol - install it if it's absent) from the SoundWire window and there go to 'Configuration/Profile' and switch to 'Off' to hear only the sounds from Android.

Foobar2000 and FoobarCon component setup can be used also in Linux (I tested in Playonlinux) and remotely controlled from Android with FoobarCon.

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Use Apple Airplay Protocol.

There is plenty of software using that like Airfoil Speakers which works on android, windows, ios...

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