I had a wow moment yesterday.
I know I am late in the game, but I got iTunes sharing working in my home network last night and it rocked. Better late to the party than never showing up, I say.
It all started in the office, when Gavin showed us the power of iTunes sharing. Right now, we have 2 PCs, and a G5, and two Powerbooks, all sharing music in the same subnet. Like having your own radio stations.
I decided to try the same thing in my home network.
So back at the ranch, iTunes was running on my G4 Powerbook, my wife's iBook, and The PC (that hath no name) and all the music on each machine was shared.
My wife was listening to Radiohead from the study's stereo. What's so special about that, you say?
Well, the shared song was played on the PC (which was on the wired part of the network) and streamed to her iBook (on the wireless Airport part of our network), which was then sent from her iBook's headphone port to the Aux channel of stereo via an RCA-to-Din8 cable.
And the whole time, she was working on her iBook, oblivious to where this song on the stereo was coming from, or the path it took to get there.
The transparent way all this worked just blew me away. The PC has 16Gb of music on it (it has an 80Gb hard drive in it, so may as well use it for music, since it is only used for games). To be able to listen to this on my stereo, located far away, is too cool.
Setting this up was not very difficult, although I had some initial trouble with the PC's firewall blocking the port iTunes was using to share music (port 3689), but a visit to the firewall settings on the PC took care of that quickly.
My next mission will be to try to get an Airport Express, or better yet, something that can stream music to multiple speakers in the house. Maybe an Airport Express as a main music base station, sending music to the living room stereo, while having the ability to send music the other wireless access points attached to speakers in the bedrooms and the study.
And oh, a remote control, maybe with a touchscreen would be nice too. I have heard of people using Salling Clicker to control their Airport-Expressed iTunes via a Bluetooth phone. That would work too, I suppose.
I wonder if an iPod can be used to send music wirelessly to speakers located throughout the house too. Hmmm.
