Well, I guess , if everything I install does the same, then what? I mean, if I had my way, WindowBlinds, and WindowFX wouldn't have any running processes while unloaded. Where is the line drawn? How much is too much?

One of the reasons we users "customize" our rigs is to have it look good, work well, AND have it run fast.  Given, a few things running all the time isn't so terrible, but if all software did that, medium to low end rigs would slow down.

I like having control of what runs and what don't. Especially if I'm not using it.

When I turn something off, I would prefer it to be off.

It's just me, I guess.

Seriously, why so hard? Why not a simple button/checkbox to turn it off. Some people I know have no business messing around in services. Or command prompt, for that matter.

I agree with the Redneck.  It seems more and more software wants to add itself to startup, add a service or two and as many running processes as they deem fit. (IE9 and NVidia are both good examples) Add all the updaters and before you know it ,taskmanager is a long, confusing list of mostly unneeded, unused processes.

The first thing I did with both my rigs was to shut down a load of these or switch to manual Good software will at least let me do that. Great software will make it easy for me by giving an option, like r-click the systray and exit, restart by clicking on a desktop icon the program created.

Simply put, casual users with low end rigs don't need any extra load of things running when not needed and the power users with high end rigs don't want them.

One thing I've already noticed that makes this not very useful for me is that you have to have speakers (or headphones) plugged into the PC that you want to stream music from.

I was hoping that you could use this on a PC without speakers to stream the music to a primary PC (since I use Input Director to control multiple PC's from one).

Problem is, the secondary PC's don't have speakers... so Windows has the sound on mute because "No speakers or headphones are plugged in".

You may have an option in your sound drivers to disable this feature.

I want to say this is on a Realtek sound card, yes?

They are.  I went and fiddled around with a few things (updated the realtek drivers, toggle the sound card off in BIOS then back on, etc).

Something in all of that seemed to get it out of that state and just to "muted" normally.  Now the sound is coming across fine.

This is quite awesome.

Any guess as to what it was?

Looking at some of the threads out there based on that text string, I'd say it was the BIOS toggle, tbh.  Microsoft lists your soundcard being disabled in BIOS as one of the main reasons for that error.  So if for some reason the system thought it was disabled at the BIOS level...

Seeing as how the drivers had been updated fairly recently, that was the only thing that I did that I think made any difference.

You might want to look into this. Icon in the taskbar clones itself endlessly in the tray. Seems to happen on the receiver only.

Windows 7 64bit Home Premium.

EDIT: Happens while receiving, turn off sending on the other machine stops the cloning.

EDIT2 : On the 'sender' machine AB turns the volume on off on off every second. Creative Xi-Fi USB there.

EDIT3: Tried another machine as sender, same result. Audio is turned on/off forever. Needless to say no sound at all at the receiver...

Bought too soon, I guess. But as this is beta I hope the issues will be handled soon.

Network is gigabit here, just for info.

I think the problem is on your receiver.  It sounds like the process is crashing out constantly hence the repeated icons.

Could you look in the event log and see if there is information on crashing processes?

Also what does it say on the about box on the receiver for your audio setup?

Great little product. Bought it almost immediately.

Two things though:

1. Would you consider making a mute toggle menu option when right clicking the tray icon when on the receiving computer. Or even "better", left clicking toggles mute. Right now I have to go a few clicks through the normal speaker icon and contextually doing it through the AB-icon would be nice to have.

2. Could you please explain how and when "Allow this machine to be unmuted" works. I tried some different scenarios but didn't get hold of it.

Oh, btw, I posted a link to the shopping page on the KVR forum: http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=4877060#4877060

Could be very useful for home producers/musicians wanting to lie down in the sofa while working.

This would be if, say, you had a computer in your bedroom, and another in the living room.  If you were streaming to the living room, but also wanted to listen to the audio in the bedroom, you could turn that option on, then unmute the bedroom computer so the music would be playing in both rooms.

No logs, sorry.

Is there any intention of making it possible to stream the audio to more than one computer? (in my case; 3 other household Win7 HomePremium)

Is there any intention of making the audio source selectable?

As a sidenote: the streamed audio quality  is impressive.

I'm not griping - just wanting to understand - how is this better than just loading the audio files from the master computer via homegroup/network file sharing/media player?

Is everything streamed from the master computer - not just individual applications - what is the expected scenarios where this is useful?
When I think of remote computer control I usually expect sound/visual/remote control to be needed all at once - not just audio.

Can I control what audio is playing on the master computer from the client computer? Or does everything have to be initiated on the master computer first?

Accoustic bridge sounds (giggle) interesting/useful - but I'm not understanding what need it is fulfilling.

Here's a suggestion which might be cool - open up the service to vbscript methods to send bursts of audio to and from computers - then I could build a little intercom system around my house network with DesktopX 

I don't want to use my main machine to play audio.  My music is not on that machine and I don't want to use resouces on my primary.  So I run the music off the laptop and listen on the primary.

I also have a server set to use audio alerts . . and I can hear those on teh primary too.

The purpose of Acoustic Bridge is to basically act as a set of remote speakers where the sending computer is probably very close to the receiving computer.

Similar to Multiplicity which reduces the need for multiple keyboards and mice on your desktop, Acoustic Bridge reduces the need for multiple speaker systems as well as allowing say a laptop with poor speakers to share the much better speakers your desktop machine might have.

You might want to watch say a video while you work and using your laptop for it rather than your main computer frees up screen space, or you might be playing a game on the laptop and want to use your Desktop PC 5.1 audio setup.

As an example of usage, as well as a main PC I have a test box and a laptop both of which might be being used for various tasks, but any sound from any of them will come out the one set of speakers.  If I need to mute sound then they all get muted at once, if I want to change the volume they all get changed at once.

Thanks both Zubaz's and Neil's response have helped me to understand a bit better.