Hi Everyone! Upon reading other posts here there seems to be quite some confusion as to what I'm talking about, perhaps I didn't explain it correctly so I'll give it another try.
The original question was from a list member regarding volume levels for his FM transmitter and I suggested an Airport Express as an alternative, other people have suggested other alternatives. Now I'm not exactly sure what people are thinking here because an Airport Express really has nothing to do with Itunes, yes! you can use Itunes with an Airport Express but more of that in a moment. An Airport Express is in fact a small Wi-Fi base station which can be used that way or an extension to a network, i'll give the web site address out later so you can find out more information about its network capabilities suffice to say that its incredibly versatile. Anyway, the Airport Express is a box about 3 inches square that plugs into the AC power, it has 2 sockets on it, one being a 100MBPS ethernet socket and the other being a 3.5MM analogue/optical digital audio out jack and here's where the fun starts, you can stream to this Airport Express and by using the audio out jack, have your audio piped to whatever device you prefer, a set of computer speakers, the aux in of a boom box, the digital in of a surround-sound system etc. Now back to Itunes - which incidentally the blind can use on both Windows and Mac machines without sighted help - it will detect these Airport Express modules, in fact you can have more than one in your system, I have 3 and each is in a different room connected to different audio devices so Itunes can stream your audio to these but it doesn't stop there so now we come to the software Airfoil. Airfoil takes or rather "Hijacks" the audio source of applications - say Winamp or Windows Media Player - and streams this to the Airport Express or to a separate software application called Airfoil Speakers, this software is used on another computer somewhere in the house thus turning it into a pair of remote Speakers. So that's about all for my explanation and I hope I've painted a better picture but as you can see, the Airport Express has several great advantages over FM transmission which is why I opted for it in the first place, no interference problems, crystal clear sound, you can transmit surround-sound audio if you need to and so on and the price of one of these things? Well I don't know what the price of the Ccrane transmitter was but I'd be willing to bet the Airport Express would be about the same price. You can find out more about Airport Express at http://www.apple.com/airportexpress and yes, its not computer specific meaning that its a network device so you can configure it with whatever operating system takes your fancy. For more information on Airfoil for Mac and Windows go to http://www.rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/mac/ this company also make a nice product called Radio Shift but more about that in another post. Cheers ****************************** Dane Trethowan >From Melton Victoria Australia mailto:"grtd...@internode.on.net Twitter: http://twitter.com/grtdane blog: http://www.grtdane.wordpress.com Phone United Kingdom 02032874641 Phone Australia 0390058589 Phone United States 8159261869 Fax: +61 3 9743 7954x MSN grtd...@dane-trethowan.net skype:grtdane12 ****************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: pc-audio-unsubscr...@pc-audio.org
