Inspirational Technology

Two Computers, One Set of Speakers

Since I've been using my Tablet PC a lot to listen to music from listen.com Rhapsody, I wanted an easy way to share the speakers that are hooked up to my desktop Mac. My first thought of course was to just run a splitter to the speakers and then hook it to both systems. My second thought was that that is probably a bad idea, but I tried it anyway. It of course isn't a good idea. The much simpler solution is to run the line out from the Tablet PC into the line in on the Mac. You then just need a simple piece of freeware called LineIn to pass the line in through so that it can play through the Mac's speakers. This works quite well, so now anytime the Tablet is docked it plays through the speakers on my Mac and then if you undock it you can just plug in headphones to continue listening. It also allows you to control the volume using the keyboard controls on the Mac.