ellingsson.se/blog

well yesterday tennis season finally started. nice to have some warmth in this region. now I'm looking forward to many upcoming challenges during this summer. may the best man win!

This weekend I bought myself an Airport Express and it sure is sweet! My problem was that I didn´t want to lay out cables from my computer (running iTunes mostly all of the time) to my living room where I got a stereo with better speakers. So what to do? Well... if one would like to stream music from one room to another and dont own a xbox 360 or any other type of supporting hardware, and also would like the price to be realistic, it is hard to find a good solution.

I first had my eyes on the squeezebox from slimdevices, but it costed 3 times as much as one single airport express. And all i wanted was really a device to output my music wirelessly to the stereo. The squeezebox is more sofisticated and can do a lot more, but it is not integrated with iTunes and requires a separate server to run on my workstation, So for that reason i bought myself the Airport express from Apple to try it out. And the result? Well... It couldn´t be better!

It was easy to install, easy to setup, and it works perfectly! - even on my PC And if Apple on monday releases it´s "iTV", i could get that one and later put my Airport Express in the kitchen, having my tunes available all over the appartment

The only thing I really missed was that with the Airport express it is not posible to control the songs without running to the computer all the time cause it doesn't got a remote control as the squeezebox does. Well, I solved this by using my Sony Ericsson k700 as a remote though bluetooth. Sony Ericsson has relesed a software [link] to make hid-files which you could put on you cellphone, and it allows you to controll a external device as in my case a computer. Whenever I now want to control my songs or pause/play songs in iTunes (when im to lazy to get out of my couch), I start up the script on my cellphone and the interface then allows me to control iTunes - Sweet!

Im really satisfied with my solution and it does precise what i intended it to do. On the left image you can se how my phone controled interface turned out.