Our living room is a television-free zone. We chose to have this space in our home as a place to relax, to talk, listen to music, and entertain friends. Having seen too many living rooms in people's homes turned into shrines for the almighty big-screen HDTV, we felt it important to create a space that ran counter to this trend, and it works for us. I read in there, my wife and I will have a cocktail after work and talk, we have friends over and nobody is pretending not to stare over your shoulder at the television as you try to engage them in conversation. It's a salon from the days of yore, not a home theatre, but this is all a digression from my main point.

We have an unobtrusive, but potent sound system installed in this room which we use regularly. I employed a Roku Soundbridge for the longest time which served my library-streaming needs perfectly: I had my entire music library on the desktop computer upstairs being served by a Firefly media server. The Soundbridge not only connected and played anything in the library, it accessed internet radio streams as well. After it strangely, suddenly died an untimely death - I felt the loss immediately. Of course, I could burn a CD of music from the library upstairs, the limitations of which should be obvious. I could plug in my iPod to the stereo and do it that way, but the same problem exists. Roku still makes the Soundbridge, but it's become a niche device and is only available by mail-order. It would also cost me the better part of 2 bills to get one. Not exactly what I had in mind. Any other streaming options currently on the market were either prohibitively expensive (I'm looking at you, Sonos) or had gone all aflutter over streaming video as well, a feature I had no use for and thus was uninterested in paying for.

At this point I hit upon the Airport Express. The current model Express allows wireless clients to connect via 802.11n, and will serve your iTunes library wirelessly through AirTunes. Could this be what I needed?

I realized also that this would solve any connectivity problems I have on the main floor of our house. The DSL modem and router are upstairs in the study, and sometimes I have dropouts when connected wirelessly downstairs. With the Express extending my existing Airport Extreme network, it would serve not only as a way of streaming my media to the stereo downstairs, but provide additional wireless coverage to the rest of the house.
Perfection.

Setting it up was pretty simple, although one has to be relatively careful when extending an existing wireless network with WDS - the settings on both the Extreme base station and the Express remote have to be exactly the same. Now, I can use Apple's free Remote app for the iPhone and iPod touch to browse and play my entire iTunes library. It's literally the exact situation I had with the Roku Soundbridge, with the added benefit of increased wifi coverage and a better control interface by using the free iPhone app. I should mention that this solution cost half as much as replacing the original gear. Nice.

There are however, two issues with the Remote app that I would like to mention for anyone considering the same setup. 1. Internet Radio. iTunes allows you to connect to and play internet radio streams, but the Remote app has no way of browsing them, even though a whole section exists in your iTunes library for these streams. Here's a workaround: create a playlist, title it something obvious like "Internet Radio," and drag your favourite streams into it from the Radio section. You'll be able to browse this playlist on the Remote app and play the ones you want from there. Not perfect, but it works. 2. No wifi streaming to the iPhone/iPod itself. This surprised me, as it seems like a no-brainer for Apple to include this functionality. Here I have a Mac sharing it's iTunes library to the local network. Any other computer on the network can see this library and play from it. But an iPod (from the very company that prides itself on it's effortless functionality and connectivity) can't stream music from an iTunes library on the network it's connected to. The Remote app allows me to control iTunes - I can even select which speakers to send the stream to. Why it doesn't also allow streaming to the app itself is beyond me. It's sending playlist data, album cover art, etc, but no audio stream. Bizarre. There are other options like Simplify Media and dot.tunes, but I have no interest at the moment of browsing my iTunes library over the internet at large through a web browser. A kludge, considering how elegantly this should work from an Apple-based solution itself.

This strikes me as either an incomprehensible oversight, or it's in the works for a later revision of the app. One can wish.