Airport Express

[arno]

Hi,

I'm not very much into av stuff but I was wondering if I would get a decent sound by ripping my CDs into lossless files using iTunes and then using an Airport Express to send the music from a laptop to a Hi-Fi system. Also, would the sound be affected if I use an external HD to stock the music? Sorry if that has already been asked or if the question is completely silly

[Destrukticor]

i have all my music stored on my imac upstairs and use my macbook to stream it to my stereo downstairs using my macbook.

works perfectly well and there aren't any hiccups

all you need to do is make sure itunes is always running on your main computer.

no to sure whether you can stream from an external hd as this would also need to be on all the time but i don't see why not.

[kernow]

Hi,

I'm not very much into av stuff but I was wondering if I would get a decent sound by ripping my CDs into lossless files using iTunes and then using an Airport Express to send the music from a laptop to a Hi-Fi system. Also, would the sound be affected if I use an external HD to stock the music? Sorry if that has already been asked or if the question is completely silly

This is exactly what I do, it goes from the airtunes straight into my DAC, and sounds wonderful, using lossless AAC.

My music is stored on my linux fileserver, and my pc laptops' itunes is pointing to a network share \\zeus\music ( http://82.46.46.252/music/ ) ( I guess I could access it anywhere in the world too ), then I just use itunes and airtunes to stream to my hifi system.

You feel a little locked in just using all apple stuff but theres software out there to use the airtunes as a secondary linux sound card , meaning you can stream anything to it that you want, including formats it doesn't usually support such as FLAC, or just using it to play any sound such as a movie or just your desktop whizzes and beeps.

[Destrukticor]

kernow thats a varied collection of things you have

[JP]

Lol...William Shatner!!!!

Kernow, you're a star!!!

EDIT:
Oh yeah, I'd recommend FLAC too for the encoding. If you use Apple Lossless it's then locked to Apple. You can update your iPod, if you have one, to run FLAC.

FLAC will sound identical to CD and you can compress/uncompress it as many times as you want without any loss of quality.

[kernow]

I own all of those on CD too, thats about 60% of my CD's I think, I'll get round to the others soon.

That shatner album is classic.. really is

[SubparMario]

The Squeezebox does much the same thing.

http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_squeezebox.html

I've got FLACs on my external HDD. The Squeezebox sits with the Hi-Fi and lets you browse/play the music wirelessly. You can also have them encoded to MP3 on the fly and streamed over the internet (e.g. to a work PC)

[muddy]

Oh yeah, I'd recommend FLAC too for the encoding. If you use Apple Lossless it's then locked to Apple. You can update your iPod, if you have one, to run FLAC.

Not entirely true...

The open source library libavcodec now incorporates a decoder for Apple Lossless format which means that any media player based on that library, including VLC media player and MPlayer, should be able to play Apple Lossless files.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless

[muddy]

To be honest with you (and this is for proper up-tight audiophiles), lossless encoding in iTunes isn't really worth diddly unless you can verify the source it came from. iTunes doesn't provide a log report of how cleanly the audio tracks were ripped. Remember, there is no error checking available on Red book Audio format CDs...

If you're iTunes doesn't read the CD correctly, you'll get a blip (sometimes, audible, sometimes not) so your encode is lossless, but not an exact copy.

If you want to get super anal about this kind of stuff, you need to use EAC (Exact Audio Copy) on a PC to rip your audio and keep a log of how well the track was ripped. I think rippers like EAC and cdparanoia do things like read a section of audio a number of times and compare the results, see if each read was the same. If it wasn't, do it again... and again... and again.

Me, I can't be arsed with all that! Rip everything at 160kbs AAC and have it streaming from my Mac Mini (always on) with USB2 external drive (iTunes library on here, spins up only when needed), to either my Airport Express or MacBook Pro.

I rip at lower quality to fit more onto my iPods.

One day, when I get a 2TB drive or something, I may re-rip everything properly (with EAC etc) and FLAC the lot... one day.

[kernow]

I use the same library in the link above for my 20GB ipod too, lossless.. heh

500MB an album or whatever.. its ok , less battery life but sounds nice, and I can't be arsed to have a separate MP3 library or whatever.

[arno]

Thanks for the feedback that was really helpfull. I think I'll go that route and re-rip all my CD's when I'll get the chance :thumbup:

[arno]

Sorry another question, will the airport express work with windows vista?

[muddy]

Sorry another question, will the airport express work with windows vista?

Yes

(though I haven't used it, as long as iTunes is running on Vista, it should be fine)

Essentially, it's just an 802.11g router, with some smart software bits in to do print/tune stuff.

[arno]

Ok thank you very much

[arno]

I have another question: what's the difference between the squeezebox and the Airport Express? Is it worht the price difference?