tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3917869.post-1129513435303241932005-10-16T20:43:00.000-05:002005-10-16T20:45:17.830-05:00Streaming Media<br /><br />Recently I've purchased a Mac iBook G4. Love it. The machine really rocks. For several months I noticed itunes but didn't do anything with it. I don't have an ipod or an MP3 player. No real need.<br /><br />However, my wife and I did decide to make a CD or two and we bought a couple of songs from itunes and used the itunes app to burn the CD.<br /><br />On a lark though, I ripped all of our CD's. I did make a mistake and ripped them as WAV. After my disk filled up after 5 CD's, I went back and actually READ what the different formats actually were. Fortunately, itunes has a really good conversion concept so I didn't have to re-rip.<br /><br />I selected AAC, which is Apple's compression/decompression algorithms for music encoding. (the music is stored in an compressed format on your disk drive and I chose the apple format).<br /><br />I went ahead and ripped the rest of our CD's, which was between 100-200 CD's. Wow. What a job. That took about 2 weekends of just servicing the disk drive.<br /><br />Now that we had all the CD's ripped. What could we do? Not much really. We did start listening to music in the evenings before bedtime which was something we didn't do much of. That was nice. Apple speakers not too bad, but still very tiny and tiNNy speakers.<br /><br />A week later or so, we had company over and so I made a nice play list of up-tempo music and we played it from the laptop. Not so cool. My wife says that it is too tinny.<br /><br />So now I decide that I ought to be able to plug in the Mac to the home stereo and that was pretty easy - Radioshack mini-jack to RCA adapter cables. But that isn't very cool because I have to have my Mac near the home theater system to play music and I have to string cables.<br /><br />So, my next mission is to try to find something so I don't have to string cables. I searched HIGH and LOW and so far the best next thing is the Apple Airport Express. It basically plugs into the wall and then you plug the minijack to RCA adapter cable into it. Then from ANY computer running itunes you can play the music you select on any stereo hooked to the airport express. very cool. you can name them AND you can have multiple units in the house. <br /><br />I DID leave out an important detail... you have to have a wireless network in your house, which I do. The airport express is super easy to setup, even better on a Mac, but I think its pretty easy on Windows.<br /><br />Now, we want to put speakers in our bedroom. But I DO NOT want a stereo system. What I want is something like airport express + audio amplifier that I can throw into the attic. And it has to be small, like a small novel. <br /><br />So far I have not found anything like this. I have found close calls by Netstreams and by Barix but not anything too close. I have found a very good simple amp (RCA in, speaker posts out) by Sonic Impact. <br /><br />Also, I've noticed that I get 'skips' or 'drop-outs'. Oddly enough, this occurs more with the 802.11G (54 kbps) network than with my older 802.11B (11 kbps [ kilobits per second] ) network. I don't quite figure that out. My new router does allow me to put priority on the music data so I'll do that.<br /><br />All for now.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3917869-112951343530324193?l=prairieview.blogspot.com'/></div>The Authornoreply@blogger.com0