Braden is back (sort of) from paternity leave, so the show is almost back to the regular format. There's a little news, some listener email and a detailed discussion of Ara's experience with the Mac Airport Express for whole house audio.
Airport Express (~$95
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A couple of podcasts ago I (Ara) talked about possibly running audio into my bathroom. At that time I was just kind of playing around. Then I thought why not. The only requirement I had was that the entire system had to be small. Being that my entire audio collection was in iTunes I gave Apple first shot at the solution. As it turns out, it was this solution that caused me to give up my squeeze box set up for audio distribution. I started with two Airport Expresses and ended up with three by the time the experiment was over. Now this product has been around for quite sometime so there is nothing new here. But when I added Remote Buddy's control of the device via an iPhone I found a compelling reason to talk about it!
The Airport Express allows you to listen to your iTunes music library in any room of your house (as long as you have wired or wireless to your network connection). You simply plug the Airport Express into a power outlet and then connect it to your receiver or powered speakers. Itunes and the Airport Express will perfectly sync your music between several Airport Expresses in different rooms. As an added benefit you can Extend the range of your current wireless network. You can also connect and share a USB printer without the need for a computer to be turned on.
The concept is simple enough. Your iTunes application is the control interface for the audio network. From there you can select the music like you normally do. The new addition to the application is a small pop up menu that becomes visible when an Airport Express is found on the network. From this pop up menu you select the speakers to route the audio to. Your choices are Computer, any of the individual Airport Expresses, or any combination of the two. The only drawback is that there is no way to send one song to the computer and another song to any of the Airport Expresses. On my network I was able to work around this issue. More on that in a bit. If multiple "speakers" are selected the Mac pings the Airport Express and measures the delay and makes sure that the audio is in sync. There was never a case of the music being out of sync. The SONOS system is as rock solid in this regard but I have had some sync issues with the Squeeze boxes in the past.
The way I was able to resolve different music in different zones was to put put an alias to iTunes folder on all my computers. This alias pointed to the networked drive which is always on. Now all the computers see the same playlists and music files. So to have different music playing in different zones you need two computers with iTunes running on them. One computer sends one song to a zone and the other computer does the same thing
Setup is straight forward. The only thing that caused me a little grief was that my wireless network is WEP encrypted so it took me a couple of minutes to figure out Apple's setup application would never find it. I had to connect it to the network with an Ethernet cable so that I could name it and input the WEP password so it would show up on the network. There was no need to configure iTunes. Once it saw the devices on the network iTunes knew what to do.
In my media room I connected it to the receiver and turned off connect360. Connect360 is an application that allows you to play your DRM free music on the Xbox 360. The drawback there is that you need to turn on your Xbox to play your music. It also does not support music with DRM. In the living room, I have JBL sound Sticks tucked away behind my couch so you don't see any evidence that there is a music player anywhere in the room. But the best thing of all is how the iPhone with
Remote Buddy controls iTunes on any of my Macs.
Like I said at the beginning of this review, I ordered my third Airport Express this week. I just need to decide whether its going in the bathroom or the garage. Maybe, I'll make it a floater. It is a trivial task to move the Airport Express from one zone to another.
