Apple AirTunes & Airport Express

Steve Crandall has some thoughts on using Apple AirTunes. What's AirTunes? If you have the new Airport Express gizmo you can stream music from any home computer that has iTunes. Steve has been using the new system in his house for 2 weeks and calls it revolutionary (although he also sees room for improvement).

I've only been using it for about a week, but I completely agree with his observations. My wife had a party for her law firm at our house last weekend and we used it to play music during the party. People were shocked when they were told that the music was coming from the iMac in the kitchen. The ability to call up any song at a moment's notice from the vast library of digitized music is something that has to be experienced first hand. The other morning my wife used my laptop to pull up the song she wanted to hear while she was getting ready for work.

The funny thing is that she played a song that wasn't on my laptop. How did that happen? Well, iTunes uses a special technology that allows any computer running iTunes to see the music on any other nearby computer and to play that music. So my wife was using my laptop to wirelessly communicate with the downstairs iMac, which then wirelessly sent its music to the Airport Express that was attached to the stereo that uses wires and connects to various speakers through the house. And all this amazing stuff doesn't just work on Macs; it works on PCs too.

Anyway, the net result of this amazing technology is that I now can easily listen to music on my home stereo. It was too hard before so we never used the stereo. Now that it's easy we listen to music almost all the time. Nice.