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One of the things I've been trying to do off and on over the years was setting up my computer to broadcast audio throughout the house while being able to control itunes remotely. I've had varying degrees of success, yet not quite getting what I was hoping for. One would think that I would have had such a solution hammered out long ago, but nope.
You may also know that my music library is kinda big, up past 60k files now. The total non-stop playing time of this library is somewhere around 6 months. And therein lies the magic of it. Whenever I plan on digging into a task and I want to let the music play, I'll set it to DJ which is kinda like plain random but it only displays the next 50 tracks instead of showing a random order of all 60k. Yeah, I can see what the next 50 songs are, and I won't know what they'll sound like until they play, because a lot of them haven't been listened to before. And I've found a lot of good songs that way.
So, when I'm in an entirely different room, the music is going, and I hear a new song that I like, my choices are to either let it keep playing and hope I can find it again via the Last Played metadata, or get up from what I'm doing to go see what song it is. Given that my sense of concentration is fragile, stopping what I'm doing is something I would much like to avoid. Or sometimes I just need to stop the music altogether to do something that cannot be ignored.
Things I've tried:
-Having the whole library on one laptop that can be moved around. That was fine, until somewhere in 2005 when the library quickly outgrew the laptop, requiring both more hard drive space and more processing power than what the laptop was capable of.
-Having the whole library on a PC with the required space and power, then using a laptop to play remotely. While the PC itself had no issue with loading its library, remotely loading it started to take a long time, and tended to disconnect often.
-Really long audio cables to external speakers. The drawbacks here were signal loss over long runs, as well as ground loops that would add in a significant hum. Plus the wires would run in places where I'd walk for a lovely trip hazard.
-Bluetooth devices. This is ok if the playback speakers are in the next room. However, this house has very dense construction, so BT signals don't go far.
-Sonos wifi-based speaker. The logic here is that wifi has more power, bandwidth, and range. The speaker itself sounds great, however the Play:3 is not compatible with Itunes, so I needed a middleman program to translate it to a stream the Sonos could use. Except the middleman program has buffering issues with no way of controlling it, hasn't been updated in 3 years, and the author won't reply to any questions.
-Sonos then announced they were making Airplay 2 compatible devices, which would also be able to link to the Play:3 I got. However I was informed they are not backwards compatible with Airplay 1. So much for that, at least I didn't buy another.
-Using an older Ipod Touch (Gen 4) from ebay because it can talk with my preferred version of Itunes, and serve as a remote. This didn't work because the remote control app is no longer available for Ipods that old.
Things that worked:
-Android app with the express purpose of remote controlling Itunes. The free version works for 24 hours then locks out, the paid version was only $4, and also works on the tablet I got from Japan. To think that Android would beat Apple at their own game in this regard.
-Ihome IW2 that I got from ebay. After an initial setup, it's selectable from within Itunes.
-Airport Express. This device was meant to work primarily as a router, but it has an audio-out port and can be used for the advertised purpose of being a remote speaker outlet. They also have the option of using optical audio (aka Toslink), which would eliminate any potential for ground loop hum, something I've had to fight in the past. (As a bonus, if my main router stops working, I can press one of these into router duty.)
The neat thing about Itunes and Airplay is that it can play to all of the connected speakers at the same time, including the main audio. As opposed to Bluetooth, where I have to manually switch the whole audio to the BT device.
I'm well aware that using Itunes is at the root of the difficulty I was having. If I didn't get mired in Apple's ecosystem so long ago, I probably wouldn't have anywhere near as much trouble as I'm having now. Similarly, updating my Itunes (10.7) to the latest version (12.9) would fix some problems, but introduce others, and honestly I don't like what the newer versions have to offer.
Alternatively, had I decided long ago to go all-in on Apple's products (such as if I had gotten a bunch of Airport Express devices when they were still in active production), that would also have removed much of the difficulty. To Apple's credit, they've made sure that any Apple product would play just fine with another Apple product of the same vintage.
To Apple's discredit, they have a terrible habit of discontinuing their more useful products in favor of "aesthetics". The Airport Express was discontinued last summer, but I'm still able to find some in stores' old-new stock. To be fair, it's an 802.11n device and most routers these days are up to 802.11ac, which is much faster. Still, they could have made a more modern version that kept the audio-out? Of course not, it's not "aesthetically pleasing". But hey, I guess I'm a form-follows-function kind of guy. I don't care how it looks, I care about how it works.
Sidenote: The phrase "we think you'll like" is techspeak for "this is how we're going to do this and we don't care about what you think".
The important thing is, I now have a working system, which does enough of what I've been trying to do. I still have to do some things manually, such as initially being at the host computer to tell it to use which speaker or all, but I'll take it. And some areas of the house just have too many walls for even the wifi to fight through, so I got a range extender.
Overall, trying to leave the Apple ecosystem is like trying to leave a cult. Because that's what it is.
You may also know that my music library is kinda big, up past 60k files now. The total non-stop playing time of this library is somewhere around 6 months. And therein lies the magic of it. Whenever I plan on digging into a task and I want to let the music play, I'll set it to DJ which is kinda like plain random but it only displays the next 50 tracks instead of showing a random order of all 60k. Yeah, I can see what the next 50 songs are, and I won't know what they'll sound like until they play, because a lot of them haven't been listened to before. And I've found a lot of good songs that way.
So, when I'm in an entirely different room, the music is going, and I hear a new song that I like, my choices are to either let it keep playing and hope I can find it again via the Last Played metadata, or get up from what I'm doing to go see what song it is. Given that my sense of concentration is fragile, stopping what I'm doing is something I would much like to avoid. Or sometimes I just need to stop the music altogether to do something that cannot be ignored.
Things I've tried:
-Having the whole library on one laptop that can be moved around. That was fine, until somewhere in 2005 when the library quickly outgrew the laptop, requiring both more hard drive space and more processing power than what the laptop was capable of.
-Having the whole library on a PC with the required space and power, then using a laptop to play remotely. While the PC itself had no issue with loading its library, remotely loading it started to take a long time, and tended to disconnect often.
-Really long audio cables to external speakers. The drawbacks here were signal loss over long runs, as well as ground loops that would add in a significant hum. Plus the wires would run in places where I'd walk for a lovely trip hazard.
-Bluetooth devices. This is ok if the playback speakers are in the next room. However, this house has very dense construction, so BT signals don't go far.
-Sonos wifi-based speaker. The logic here is that wifi has more power, bandwidth, and range. The speaker itself sounds great, however the Play:3 is not compatible with Itunes, so I needed a middleman program to translate it to a stream the Sonos could use. Except the middleman program has buffering issues with no way of controlling it, hasn't been updated in 3 years, and the author won't reply to any questions.
-Sonos then announced they were making Airplay 2 compatible devices, which would also be able to link to the Play:3 I got. However I was informed they are not backwards compatible with Airplay 1. So much for that, at least I didn't buy another.
-Using an older Ipod Touch (Gen 4) from ebay because it can talk with my preferred version of Itunes, and serve as a remote. This didn't work because the remote control app is no longer available for Ipods that old.
Things that worked:
-Android app with the express purpose of remote controlling Itunes. The free version works for 24 hours then locks out, the paid version was only $4, and also works on the tablet I got from Japan. To think that Android would beat Apple at their own game in this regard.
-Ihome IW2 that I got from ebay. After an initial setup, it's selectable from within Itunes.
-Airport Express. This device was meant to work primarily as a router, but it has an audio-out port and can be used for the advertised purpose of being a remote speaker outlet. They also have the option of using optical audio (aka Toslink), which would eliminate any potential for ground loop hum, something I've had to fight in the past. (As a bonus, if my main router stops working, I can press one of these into router duty.)
The neat thing about Itunes and Airplay is that it can play to all of the connected speakers at the same time, including the main audio. As opposed to Bluetooth, where I have to manually switch the whole audio to the BT device.
I'm well aware that using Itunes is at the root of the difficulty I was having. If I didn't get mired in Apple's ecosystem so long ago, I probably wouldn't have anywhere near as much trouble as I'm having now. Similarly, updating my Itunes (10.7) to the latest version (12.9) would fix some problems, but introduce others, and honestly I don't like what the newer versions have to offer.
Alternatively, had I decided long ago to go all-in on Apple's products (such as if I had gotten a bunch of Airport Express devices when they were still in active production), that would also have removed much of the difficulty. To Apple's credit, they've made sure that any Apple product would play just fine with another Apple product of the same vintage.
To Apple's discredit, they have a terrible habit of discontinuing their more useful products in favor of "aesthetics". The Airport Express was discontinued last summer, but I'm still able to find some in stores' old-new stock. To be fair, it's an 802.11n device and most routers these days are up to 802.11ac, which is much faster. Still, they could have made a more modern version that kept the audio-out? Of course not, it's not "aesthetically pleasing". But hey, I guess I'm a form-follows-function kind of guy. I don't care how it looks, I care about how it works.
Sidenote: The phrase "we think you'll like" is techspeak for "this is how we're going to do this and we don't care about what you think".
The important thing is, I now have a working system, which does enough of what I've been trying to do. I still have to do some things manually, such as initially being at the host computer to tell it to use which speaker or all, but I'll take it. And some areas of the house just have too many walls for even the wifi to fight through, so I got a range extender.
Overall, trying to leave the Apple ecosystem is like trying to leave a cult. Because that's what it is.
