Aiport Express & iTunes Rocks
Man, I'm in wireless computing nirvana. As I type this, I'm listening to Nora Jones on my home stereo. The way the song is getting there is quite remarkable though. First, I have an AirPort Express that I just got for my birthday plugged into the wall behind my stereo, with an audio cable from it to the stereo system.
The AirPort Express is a wireless client of my existing home network. My Windows Media Center edition PC I bought over the holidays is running iTunes for Windows with the audio output set to go to the AirPort Express and therefore to my stereo system. This in and of itself is pretty damn cool. But wait, it gets better! I haven't copied my music library from my PowerBook to the Windows PC yet. I also have iTunes running on my PowerBook with a couple of playlists set to share to the network. So, my Mac is streaming Nora Jones to my Windows PC, which is streaming it to the AirPort Express, which my stereo is then playing.
Amazingly cool, right? But wait, there's still more! I'm not sitting near my Windows machine at the moment, and I want to change songs. Guess what! I'm using Remote Desktop on my PowerBook to control the Windows box and changing iTunes settings there! How many levels of indirections can I support?
Of course an astute user will figure out that I could just as easily gone directly from iTunes on my PowerBook to the AirPort Express, which is true. Not nearly as cool though...
For all of the things that suck about OS/X and the PowerBook in particular, I have to say that the iPod, iTunes, and Airport Express just freakin rock.
Another cool thing is that my Windows box doesn't have a wireless card; it is participating in this amazing setup through a traditional Ethernet connection.
In case you care, it took me about five minutes to set all of this up. I ran the AirPort Express setup wizard on my PowerBook, answered 2-3 questions, and bingo, I'm done. There's a little button on iTunes that asks me whether I want the music to go to my local machine or the stereo. I didn't have to TOUCH ITUNES AT ALL. It figured out the AirPort Express was there and what is was named as SOON AS IT JOINED MY HOME NETWORK. I'm betting if I didn't have WPA, I wouldn't have had to run the AirPort Express setup wizard at all.