Apple AirPlay

I hate clutter. Which is why I hate having wires connecting all my electrical appliances and gadgets. They are hard to clean, and they gather dusts. Also it is a nightmare trying to hide them, I mean how do you connect your rear speakers for your TV and PC in a 5.1 or 7.1 speakers setup?

So it is with great delight that Apple announced AirPlay as one of the major features of their iOS 4.2.

What is AirPlay?

AirPlay is Apple’s way of letting you play your music and videos on bigger and better speakers and screens around your house, without plugging anything in. Imagine this, you stream music and videos from your PC, to your TV, hifi, speakers, portable devices etc, all done without any wires. Neat right?

To test out whether it really works, I went to buy a Apple’s AirPort Express. What it does is that you get it connected to your home’s wireless network. Then you plug in your speakers, hifi etc. It has a USB port, a Ethernet port and a socket for audio cable. I decided to connect my JBL speakers to the AirPort Express using the audio cable.

It was not as easy as plug and play, I did encounter the following problems:

1) I was using the legacy 128bit WEP protocol to secure my wifi. Somehow the AirPort Utility, which is used to configure the network settings of the AirPort Express, just could not recognise the HEX password. In the end I had to switch to WPA before AirPort Express could recognise the password.

2) Each time a wrong setup done at the AirPort Utility was committed to the AirPort Express, I had to manually hard reset the AirPort Express before my AirPort Utility can detect the AirPort Express again. Due to the problem I had with the WEP protocol, I had to perform this hard reset a couple of times.

3) When my AirPort Express was finally setup correctly, my iTunes just could not stream music to the AirPort Express, throwing an unknown error. I initially thought it was because of the audio cable, but after changing to another one, it was still throwing an unknown error. On a hunch, I disabled my Windows Firewall, and finally I could hear music streaming from my JBL speakers! The funny thing was that I allowed all Outbound traffic in my Windows Firewall and disabled all Inbound traffic. So why is it that the AirPort Express need to make an Inbound connection back to my PC?

Despite the problems encountered, the feeling of hearing music streaming to my JBL speakers, controlling it using my iPad via the free Apple application, Remote, was really surreal and definitely worth the trouble of setting it up. I will be going to grab a few more AirPort Express, so that I can have music streaming throughout my house.

Now if only I can control my house’s lights and electrical appliances the same way too!