How do I redirect sound output from local to remote computer via network?

There is a software called Network Audio System
http://www.radscan.com/nas.html

and it is available under ubuntu, and there are plugins available for most audio players, ie: package xmms-nas

There is a potential in NAS technology. With KDE, it is unusable to redirect ALL sound to nasd running on another computer. artsd has a nas output plugin but the quality of the sound is awfull - there are skips a lot of skips.

You could use esd, it runs as a nework sound server if you pass the right arguments:

esd -tcp -port 16001

Then, from the laptop you should have some option in sound configuration that enables you to redirect the sound to a esd daemon. Sorry I don't know the name, but I use Gnome.

I have some machines working this way in a LTSP environment, and works fine. We have some breaks while playing music if there's heavy network traffic, but it's acceptable for us.

If you're trying to get the KDE notification sound effects moved onto another computer, you can use a small script and a little configuration. Here's the script:

#!/bin/sh
ssh sound_host artsplay "$@"

and then on the panel at kcontrol/Sound & Multimedia/System Notifications hit the Player Settings button, select "Use an external player" and then enter the path to the script. The sound_host will need arts and the rest of KDE on it for this to work. If it doesn't, you should be able to do something like:

cat "$@" | ssh sound_host play -

where play can play a sound via stdin.

For anyone else that might end up here looking to redirect audio from one computer to another, you might want to skip NAS and try PulseAudio:

      http://www.pulseaudio.org/

It seems like PulseAudio will be the sound system of future in Ubuntu.