Seamless Media Home – Part 1: Music

So I’m on this mission lately. I want to make all media sources in my house wirelessly integrated. I listen to a lot of music, different kinds, varying by my mood and where I am in the house. The various sources of music in my house are:

1. Macbook Pro
2. PC
3. iPhone
4. Sony Hifi
5. Television

And here are the various output sources I have at home:

1. Inbuilt Laptop Speakers
2. Bose SoundDock Portable
3. Sony Hifi
4. Creative Inspire 2.1

I bought the SoundDock for obvious sound superiority and the ability to play music directly off my phone. Now the problem was that whenever I would get an SMS or a call, the music would stop and to attend to my phone I would have to disconnect it from the dock. The SoundDock has a 3.5mm audio port for aux inputs. I figured I could use that more effectively. So here’s what I did:

1. Bought a Apple AirPort Express 802.11n (Rs. 4700 in India) which coupled with iTunes can stream music wirelessly from your computer and output to any speaker that is connected to it.
2. I configured it to connect to my wireless network and connected it to the Bose SoundDock using a 2m audio cable (The 2m is not needed, the store didn’t have a shorter cable!)
3. Now via iTunes and AirTunes I can stream music wirelessly around my house. Also, I can play music simultaneously on all the speakers connected via AirTunes (Note: For every speaker you want to connect, you will need one AirPort Express)
4. Installed the Remote app on my iPhone via the AppStore and I have an easy access to my iTunes library. I can also switch AirTunes speakers through the Remote app. Brilliant!
5. Now I got a little more greedy. The problem with AirTunes is that you can stream audio only from iTunes. No system sounds or movies etc. Did some googling and voila! – AirFoil to the rescue. This small application runs in the background and “hacks” into your AirTunes to allow audio to be streamed from videos as well. There is an obvious lag of 2 seconds or so due to the wireless nature of the link. But this can be overcome if you use the video player that AirFoil provides. Another alternative is to use VLCs audio desync feature to manually adjust the synchronisation of the audio and video streams (hit and try to get the right settings).

So there you go, listen to music wirelessly throughout your house. Also try out SweetFM – it’s a last.fm client (only for macs presently). There are obviously a lot of different ways you can achieve this and I would like to hear how you did it. This method is much cheaper than alternatives such as Bose that offer similar results but at a much much higher price.