I have a SqueezeBox 3 in my living room that I'm really pleased with. But when the time came to add another set of connected speakers I decided to go with an AirPort Express (APE) instead and then stream to this from my MacBook.
The main reason for this was Apple's Remote application for the iPod Touch. With this I can control music playback from my iPod. The two drawbacks are that I can't listen to music locally on the MacBook while streaming to the speakers and I can't sync music between the APE and SqueezeBox. Since the APE was the cheapest alternative (900 SEK compared to 1.400 SEK for a headless SqueezeBox receiver or 2.000 SEK for the SqueezeBox 3) I went with that.
The APE can also function as a wireless router so I went to work and reinstalled my local network, putting my Netgear router out to pasture. Unfortunately the 802.11G performance was worse than with my old router. This was apparent when running VNC to my HTPC where I had to enable the lowest quality setting. Not a big problem, but a nuisance nonetheless.
Then I started to stream music to the APE. Thirty seconds went by and then the sound dropped out for a couple of seconds. Then it came back on. And dropped off again. Now it is a big problem. The SqueezeBox has a nice big buffer and decodes MP3 locally, the APE works by decoding the audio on the computer and then streaming uncompressed audio over the network. Combine this with a small buffer in the APE and you get a problem when you add other network traffic.
Other people had reported issues and if I shut down network intensive applications I could get streaming to work properly. A solution, but not very satisfying.
I then started thinking (I probably should have started with this before redoing my network). The APE can also use 802.11n - which is in the 5GHz spectrum. Why not use that? I went and got the Netgear and set up two networks; one 802.11g and one 802.11n. But now I couldn't access my MacBook (running 11n) from my Touch (running 11g) which was the main point of getting the APE to begin with.
More thinking and then I put the APE in bridge mode. Problem solved. I now use 11n for the MacBook and APE and 11g and Netgear for the rest of the network (HTPC, Touch, Wii, SqueezeBox, Kid's computer).
2 comments:
I haven't been able to get my APE to stop blinking amber, nor have I been able to begin streaming my iTunes to my stereo. I've "hard" reset the APE. I've not been able torespolve these issues by using any of the Utilities, either. any ideas?
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