Comments on: I’ve been tinkering… Apple Airtunes is pretty slick

By: simon

simon — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 17:42:37 +0000

Great post, brilliant information – nice one.

By: iTunes Remote: a long time coming | wirelessaudioblog.com

iTunes Remote: a long time coming | wirelessaudioblog.com — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:55:32 +0000

[...] many early adopter types (like me) have been fiddling with Airtunes, and looking for ways to turn your iPhone or iPod Touch into a [...]

By: mtc

mtc — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 06:09:35 +0000

Don. I did notice the remote control feature in there now. I was wondering how that worked, but with Apple TV it makes perfect sense. I guess it works if Apple TV is one of a few receivers currently active? But I could ask you something… why would you be remote controlling a Airtunes feed remotely sending audio to Apple TV, wouldn’t it be better to pull the audio via the sharing capabilities?

Does Apple TV let you send audio?

When will the iPod Touch and iPhone let me stream Airtunes!!!???

Which reminds me, without Rogue’s software I was not able to set different volume levels for each of the receivers *from the source device*. I could still locally trim the Airfoil Speakers, and the speakers attached to Airports (of course), but this was not as cool as what Airfoil let me do with little sliders for each receiver. Nifty. It wasn’t however a slider linked to system volume at the receiver in the case of a PC running Airfoil speakers.

By: mtc

mtc — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 06:04:47 +0000

Mats. Noted. Correction forthcoming.

By: Don

Don — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 04:19:55 +0000

AppleTV can be used as an AirTunes target. When used this way, AppleTV even displays the track information (and album artwork I think). You can also use the AppleTV remote to skip to the next song in the playlist.

If you haven’t tried AppleTV yet, you should definitely check it out. The Take 2 revision is quite a joy. Music, amazing photos, video podcasts, youtube, and movie rentals.

By: Mats

Mats — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 03:03:44 +0000

Actually I believe they send lossless compressed audio OTA. The audio is first decoded from the source format at the source, re-compressed using Apple’s lossless codec and then transmitted OTA. This means the receiver only has to understand Apple’s lossless codec format. And it also means the receiver does not need to pay AAC & MP3 royalties. It also means that payload is heavier than a typical mp3 stream would be OTA (not sure what the average compression rate of Apple’s lossless codec is but most likely it probably varies between 0.25 to 0.75).