First we tried ripping CD’s into Windows Media Player which is great to get your CD’s in a manageable form. (Although frankly even then we didn’t feel comfortable throwing away our CD’s, though I secretly would love too.) I guess I won’t want to separate completely until I really have a reliable back-up and recovery system (an opportunity for Pure). So, everyone ripped their CDs but unfortunatley this didn't actually do much because nobody wanted to listen to music on their PC. I then purchased a Turtle Beach Audiotron. It was kind of cool because it plugged into my network and would automatically access music files that you enable to be shared on your PC. Not bad…. but then we gave an iPod to my oldest daughter for Christmas along with an iTunes account and thus had more confusion.

If you have kids, you know that owning an iPod is a required device in order to be any where remotely cool. So began my daughter’s purchase of digital music and listening to it on her iPod. The problem is she also wants to listen to her tunes on the home stereo and as it turns out so do Lisa (my wife) and I. Around this time, my daughter got into the older rock music from my youth (Chicago, Queen, Elton,etc) and we all wanted to play it at parties and for fun. At our house the stereo is piped into all the rooms on our main floor and is connected to an amp in our home office. To syncup our "tunes" and the stereo, we purchased an Apple Airport Express. This device is a home/residential router/gateway, access point, and media adapter for music. It’s very cool. I plugged it in and it showed up on the network, unfortunately its not recognized by Network Magic. It looks like it uses a corporate protocol for management called SNMP and Apple supplies a utility to configure it with all the same settings as you would see on a router management page. So for identification sake I changed the icon in Network Magic to a music media adapter and named “wireless iTunes.” You also have to buy a separate cable package to connect it to your stereo, which we did, and plugged it into the “Tape Deck 1” inputs… Kinda funny because in explaining how to connect iTunes to the stereo to my daughters, I had to explain why a stereo would use a "Tape," since they think it’s for wrapping presents.

To start playing iTunes on the stereo you need to have iTunes running on one of your computers on your network. Then, at the bottom of iTunes you will see a button that allows you to pump the sound to any of the Airports on your network. You could actually have several if you wanted, although I couldn’t get it both play on my PC speakers and the home stereo. The other thing iTunes does is let you access any iTunes library on other PCs in your home network (if they are running). This is a pretty cool feature for us because we can access my kids PC’s upstairs and use my office PC to play their music through our home stereo. In setting up iTunes we used Network Magic “My Shared Folders” to pull all the ripped music from each PC into the iTunes on our office PC. iTunes lets us go and browse for new music by telling it which folders to look at. We simply select "My Shared Folders" and pull all the CDs into iTunes and convert them to Apple's music format.

We have been using this setup for a while and it works very well. We noticed that Network Magic is doing a pretty good job of highlighting newly purchased music from iTunes, although we do wish the Album Art would show up in Network Magic and we also wish it pop-toast when a new subfolder is added and show the Ablum Art ithere as well. My daughter and I use NM to know when we each purchase music and it’s a much better alert system than iTunes. iTunes will pull it in from another computer, but it’s hard to discover.

On a final note, we also picked up one of the new Roku Sound Bridges, an iTunes wireless media adapter that also supports some of the new rental services; like raphsody and naptser. Lisa and I like to listen to music in our bedroom, but we don’t have the household music speakers on the second floor. Nor do we want to put a computer up their just to listen to iTunes or have to find our iPod and remember to bring it to the room. So the Roku device connects without any configuration to our wireless network and it has it’s own volume control, two RCA jackts, an optical jack, and comes with a cord to link the two RCA jacks with a set of speakers (like the kind you would buy for your PC sound system). We picked up some great Creative speakers from the Apple store and plugged it into the Roku. Nowwe have iTunes upstairs with the ability to select music from any PC running iTunes… it’s great.

Author: Tim