I have 2 Airport Express devices. One into a B &W Zepplin (absolutely fantastic sound) wired to CAT5. The other is wireless and hooked into our Yamaha electric piano in the lounge. Any of our laptops or Macs can stream from iTunes straight into either or both of these devices at the same time. If you stand in the doorway between the rooms there doesn't seem to be any audible lag between them. One might have thought the extra hop through wireless might be noticeable but it isn't. The wireless airport is sometimes temperamental though and can stutter sometimes where it plays a bit and then stops repeatedly. (google this and you will see that others have sometimes experienced this.) Rebooting the Airport and/or basestation seems to fix it. The wired one has always been very reliable.
Of course this only streams from iTunes. (There is a multiple speaker option on the bottom right of iTunes.) Also there is a free remote iPhone application from Apple that allows you to control the pc or mac that is streaming. Ie you can select what you want to play from the iPhone as if you have your entire music collection on it. It is very slick indeed and even the volume selection on the iPhone has almost instantaneous response.
This of course allows you to play whatever comes out of iTunes in these remote speakers, but what about music or other streaming stuff that iTunes just doesn't do?
It is possible to get iTunes to stream Internet radio such as radio 2. I added Flip4mac to get it to play the wmf stream for that after some jiggery poke with the streaming file link. The only thing is that the radio would only play on the local mac and not through the remote speakers. It seems that the decoding is done a bit later than the remote streaming part.
So the other solution we use is Airfoil (which as Rob says you have to pay a bit for to stop the noise they add in on the demo). This allows any application or the system audio to be sent to either the remote Airport Express speakers or to a remote mac or pc running Airfoil Speakers (a separate application). With this the Internet radio stations requiring Flip4mac will play to the remote speakers fine and other streaming services like Spotify also play fine through the remote speakers. Just for fun we have streamed from
Spotify to 4 different Macs at once to give that sense of sound coming from everywhere! There is a very noticeable lag with Airfoil though between why you hear and where the track really is. Move the volume or pause the track and you can expect
to wait a couple of seconds before the change is apparent. It also means that you can't watch a movie with Airfoil running as the movie is out of sync with the sound. There is another piece of software I believe from Rogue Amoeba (creators of Airfoil) that solves this problem. The other thing is that you can independently adjust the volume across output devices with Airfoil.
However there is no remote control app on the Iphone for it. The best one can do is to VNC into the streaming server and control it using screen sharing - a rather tricky job on a phone at the best of times.
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Audio Streaming new
Audio Streaming new