whole house - whole world audio through itunes et al
Let’s hash this out. Here’s my dilemma. I like listening to music everywhere I go - at home, at work, in every room, everywhere. I also like iTunes, the iPod, and the Apple Airport Extreme with AirTunes. I absolutely hate Digital Rights Management (DRM). I have bought many a stuff from iTunes music store, only to find out that my iPod loses the DRM and just won’t play music I have _payed for_, or that any AAC protected files are not playable on my linux laptop or mythtv-server. The worst part is that I would probably buy so much more music if it wasn’t so crippled with DRM. Alas, it is a sad situation, and not one that I would like to comment on much more, so here is my work-around.
At home, Jodi’s powerbook sits in the kitchen. It has iTunes and quite a few songs stored locally on its hard drive. I have my mythtv-server sharing its music through rendezvous and mDNSresponder so that it shows up under shared music. In that share I have my old iTunes collection (including some DRM protected AACs) that will play fine, once authorized on the powerbook.
This solution is nice, but there is no way to make playlists or change ratings on the shared music — since it’s not technically writable. So now, I have an nfs mount that is auto exported on the powerbook, and it can read/write/sync the entire media collection (as /mnt/media) or view it read-only through the share.
Now, I can setup a playlist of all types of media, AAC protected, mp3s, whatever from the local computer, from the mythtv-server, etc., and hit play. I use my Airport Extreme with AirTunes to stream it wirelessly to a closet where I have carefully (over several renovations, mind you) wired 14-gauge 4-wire UL-approved speaker wire all over the house. I have a pair of in-cieling speakers in the kitchen (with a volume control wired in-line), I have a pair of in-wall speakers in the bedroom (with another volume control wired in-line), and 2 more sets of in-ceiling speakers, one in the master bathroom and one in the master closet (with a single volume control to control both since they are pretty close). They are connected to an old AIWA amp with a line-in from the Airport Extreme with AirTunes. Very discreet, very sweet, whole house audio. I even named the iTunes AirTunes speaker “Whole House Audio” so that does exactly what it says.
Now I rock out to my iTunes through out the whole house. I can drop the volume locally through the volume controls if need be, but what if a crappy song comes on. Can I hit next? Can I pause? Only if I bring the powerbook with me, which is not so bad, but what if I’m in the bedroom, almost asleep, and want to turn it off (or on), or walking around the house?
If only there were a way to control iTunes from any where. I’m thinking some type of web-interface served up so that I could use a laptop, or even better, my PocketPC on the wireless LAN….
Well, lo and behold there are some applescripts for controlling iTunes, and someone has built a rudimentary interface with php running on apache on OSX, and boom, there it is: iTunes Web Remote.
There are also some scripts to grab your iTunes library and convert from iTunes to HTML (though I’ve seen an xml export of the iTunes library stored on my old PC, and I’m sure there’s a way to do an xsl transformation on that to html to make it look perty).
So there’s part of the solution. What about the ability to play anywhere? Well, unfortunately, the only streaming media solutions I know of are shoutcast and icecast (which I run on another server and soon to be mythtv-server) which do mp3s, and the Windows Media Encoder 9 (Windows only though — do I even have access to a windows machine?) — also I have heard of aacPlus (which I admit I know nothing about) but am starting to get very interested after reading this.
I almost forgot to mention my Russound 1-zone 2-channel amp that distributes audio to the bedroom, but locally will sense if audio is coming from my second mythtv-bedroom installation (or any local source, like a television), and automatically switch and amplify the local source signal and play it over the same in-wall speakers. Add to that the fact that the screen is a projector on the wall, and you can just drool over the techno-goodness that is my whole-house audio/video system.
