It’s come to my attention that over the last couple of years, although I still buy and listen to a lot of music, too much of it is through my iPod. Although I’ve got some half-decent Sennheiser earphones (i.e. not the ones that came with the device which are embarrassingly bad), that’s not really the best way to listen.
On top of that, I actually have a quite decent stereo system at home, and when I do listen to CDs via that, the quality is astonishing.
So yesterday I went out and bought an Airport Express. OK – my interest had been piqued by a conversation with Geoff a couple of weeks ago. But I now realised that this relatively inexpensive device is exactly what I needed.
Setting it up was OK, although installation on Windows wasn’t quite as simple and painless as Apple tried to claim it was. Indeed, on my Vista setup, I’d have been completely lost were it not for the fact that I’ve used WiFi for a few years now. Connecting to the Airport Express also meant losing my wireless router connection for a while until I could tie the two together into a single WiFi network.
Even that was a problem because the password I was using for my WEP-protected router wasn’t 13 characters precisely. I took the opportunity to upgrade from WEP in the protection stakes, and this also meant some fiddling on XP machines with a patch that mysteriously hadn’t been included on either of my machines (including my very recently flashed Asus Eee that now runs XP booting in under 30 seconds).
I got everything back on network with the exception of my PSP which refuses to work. No great loss as I rarely use it online these days.
As for the Airport Express? Well it works very well indeed. I think that Apple might include at least a cable in the box, but I’d bought one knowing that they hadn’t.
And once installed, all the computers with iTunes on my network saw it, and gave me the option of streaming music to it rather than the tinny computer speakers.
Now I need to properly work out a single place for my iTunes library – preferably on a NAS drive. And finally I can start to comprehensively rip all my CDs in the same format. I have some as mp3s (and with an ongoing eMusic subscription, I’m likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future). Others are in Windows Media format, while anything ripped more recently is in AAC – at 256k. That’s a particularly important detail, as I don’t want my stereo finding the encoding quality wanting.
Any recommendations of NAS devices or enclosures with good power management (I don’t want the drives continually spinning), would be more than welcome.