Streaming Music With My Old Airport Express

A "bonus" post of sorts for this month... Painfully obvious from my recent posts, I’ve been doing a lot of work on my guitars lately. I'm having a blast, but it’s time consuming work. I find that playing some music helps keep things moving along.

Until recently I had been using my iPod for that purpose, because I’m working at my studio workstation desk where my laptop resides. Running iTunes software, computers (along with my iPod) have been my main source of music for years now, effectively replacing all my CD players. The laptop is usually connected to my studio speakers via a special "Y" cable, with an 1/8" stereo mini-plug on one end that goes into the laptop's headphone jack, and the other end splits into separate Right and Left 1/4" plugs that go to the speakers. So when I’m working on my guitars, I have to move the laptop off the desk, and usually onto my bed, nearby. That audio cord I use is way too short to reach from the speakers to the bed - about 3 feet, and I haven't been able to locate longer ones of this type. I could certainly play music from my iTunes on the laptop via the laptop's built-in speakers, which I tried at first. The sound is loud and clear, but a bit wimpy - I need some BASS in the music I listen to! Using the iPod is fine, but having those dang earbuds in my ears for hours on end is rough on my ears, so that’s not ideal either.

I came up with an idea: I remembered that I still have an older Apple Airport Express Wifi base station, bought years ago when 802.11g was the fastest WiFi standard available to most consumers. I replaced it just last year by its big brother, the Airport Extreme, which has the current 802.11n standard and other features that the Express doesn't have. So until now, the Express had been just sitting, collecting dust. However, the Express is unique from the Extreme in that it has an 1/8" stereo audio out jack that you can connect to a pair of speakers, and wirelessly stream your iTunes audio out to those speakers from anywhere in your home. This feature was originally called "AirTunes" when it was available only on the Express. In recent years, Apple came up with AirPlay, which includes streaming audio from iOS devices to computers and Apple TV, and eventually they changed the name for the Express' streaming feature to unify it all together and, I suppose, to make things less confusing.

After plugging in the Airport Express to power, I went to the laptop, and launched the "Airport Utility" program to configure the Express to join my current WiFi network as an AirTunes device. During this setup, you can give your AirTunes speakers a name of your choosing for easy recognition. Then I went to the AirPlay icon button in the lower right corner of my iTunes window, where you configure which speakers you want the iTunes audio to stream to. Once configured, it worked great, no issues whatsoever. I can now have my laptop sitting anywhere in my apartment and stream iTunes into the bedroom connected this way. Yes, the distance from the speakers to the bed is only about 4 or 5 feet, but if you don't have an audio cable that length to connect your laptop and speakers, this comes right in handy. You also have the option to stream iTunes audio out to multiple speakers at once - very cool!

One thing I noticed after configuring the Airport Express to join my WiFi network is that, because the device uses the older and slower 802.11g, it slows down any other devices on the network to that standard, such as my 802.11n Airport Extreme I now use for Internet access. I noticed that web pages (especially with video) load noticeably slower at "g" speeds. The problem could be solved by buying an updated Express that runs on "n", but I wouldn't bother for this type of occasional use. I see myself only using it while I'm working on guitars, or some other situation where I'd need the laptop to be out of the way, and I wouldn't have need for much web browsing then, anyway. I can simply plug in the Express when I want to stream from iTunes, and unplug it when I don't need it, returning to full network bandwidth again with the Extreme. A nice feature, and a good way to put "retired" equipment back to work...

Selecting the AirPlay speakers, labeled "Bedroom".

Airport Express (white box), with an audio cable (orange & grey plugs) connected to my speakers. My laptop - off to the left about 4 or 5 feet away, untethered.