Using Airplay to Wirelessly Stream Music and Video

I've used SlimDevices (Now Logitech) Squeezeboxes for years, which is why I'd previously had very little interest in the Apple alternative. Since getting an AppleTV, I've become more interested in the wireless streaming of music about the house using AirPlay. The technology is built into iTunes, the Airport Express WiFi base station and, of course, the AppleTV itself. It's so simple and flexible to use that I'm regretting messing about with the Squeezeboxes previously.

In my house, I have an old iMac that is turned on all the time. It has a connection to a 4TB network drive with all my music and movies. So it acts as an iTunes server. I've configured Home Sharing on all the Apple devices in my network so that they can all share music libraries seamlessly.

From the iTunes console of that iMac, you can see the power of AirPlay. It can play music and then pipe it out to one or more network speakers. In iTunes, you can see the speaker control icon at the bottom right of the screen:

In the above, "Kitchen" is an AirPort Express and "Living Room" is an AppleTV.

Using this to choose the place to play the music is simple. Just choose the name of your AirPlay device and the music will come from the speaker you chose. The icon turns blue to signify that music is not being played locally ("Computer").

There is a second mode that allows the output to be streamed to multiple speakers, including the local computer that is running iTunes. Choose the "Multiple Speakers" option to bring up a second dialog box. You can even have independent volume controls across each speaker. (I prefer to leave them at maximum and use the physical controls on each speaker to adjust volume).

Er, that's it.

We'll look at streaming non-iTunes music and how to remotely control your iTunes library from your iPad/iPhone next time.