Upstairs, I've got my computer. Downstairs, I've got matthew_k's ReplayTV, which needs to get onto my network, and a home stereo, which might as well get music from my computer.

The "obvious" solution to all this would be an Apple Airport Express to bridge the network, and deliver tunes. I spent half of last night fighting with the damn thing to get it configured properly. Turns out, you need WDS (wireless distribution system) configured when all you want to do is create a wireless bridge. This nightmare turned out to require downloading the latest firmware for my D-Link DGL-4300, but I've finally got everything working. Probably the biggest annoyance is that all the web pages out there are inconsistent about how, exactly, you're supposed to type your WEP key into the Apple dialog box. There's some consensus that you need to prefix the hex digits with a dollar sign ($), but this caused the dialog for me to switch from 128-bit WEP to 40-bit WEP. That's clearly annoying, but it's not like WEP offers much in the way of meaningful security, anyway.

My next adventure is sorting out some kind of remote access to the tunes. I thought about setting up VNC, but that really falls down on "it just works" usability. Instead, I'm looking at two different pieces of cheap shareware: CoverBuddy and WebRemote. It annoys me somewhat to be paying for something that Apple should be providing as part of the package.

CoverBuddy pretty much works as advertised, but the interface is pretty painful. There's no search of any kind. They're really shooting for an icon-only interface that might run on a PSP web client. WebRemote is a little better, providing a lot of text, but still no search gizmo and it looks like you have to click on each song to make it play -- no way to queue up and entire album at once.

Am I missing something? Do I have to do VNC to have decent functionality?

It's a little too late, but I would have suggested a SlimServer/SqueezeBox instead. It also provides bridging, at least according to the manual. (I've never used it for that.)

I have an older SqueezeBox (version 1), which doesn't provide the bridging. That's a newer feature, and it seems like a stretch to buy another one ($300?) just to have bridging. That, and I really dislike the SqueezeBox GUI.

New thought: I was thinking that iTunes "sharing" might be the answer. I tried playing local MP3s from a laptop through the AirPort Express and it basically didn't work -- lots of skips and jumps. If that doesn't work, then there's no hope of doing via iTunes sharing, which only adds more wireless traffic.

EDIT: I also tried just playing from upstairs to downstairs (i.e., only taking one wireless hop). It certainly worked better, but I was still getting a non-trivial number of skips (maybe one or two per minute). It's just bad enough that I'm probably going to have to give up on this. The proper answer, once I'm in a house that I own again, is to run a normal Ethernet wire.

(And, I was also careful to put my home network on a different channel from all of my neighbors in an attempt to minimize interference.)

*sigh*

Is there something in the house running on the wireless network using 802.11b? That might be slowing things down enough to not allow a smooth stream to go to the Airport units. They do use a bit of bandwidth for the music, as Apple chose to do the audio decoding on the PC, then stream an Apple Lossless audio feed to the units. It's how they allow the music to be synchronized across multiple Airport units and a PC.

I can't comment much on the wireless performance of them though, because when I used the two that I have in my old house, both were wired via ethernet, then used as access points at both sides of the house. Any music streaming at most would be wireless to one unit, then ethernet to the other.

I'm pretty sure all the devices are 802.11g. I made sure that all of our own cordless phones are at 5.8GHz, so they should be out of the way. I can't do anything about the neighbors, of course.

Any thoughts on buying a larger antenna? There are a variety of aftermarket antennas with varying amounts of gain and/or directionality that I could, at least in theory, just bolt onto my router. Anybody tried something like this before?

Yes, and they make a HUGE difference. At work, we had a wireless bridge hop that was hovering at 2% when I first installed it. I added 24dB antenna's to each and am now at 97-98%. These are the pringle can variety. I have had great luck with parabolic antenna's as well.

I've had a lot of success with the etherdesigns cantenna - it's just a commercial pringles tube type thing. Arrived quickly and it's pretty cheap too....

http://www.etherdesigns.com/

Hugo

In my personal experience:

The antennas that are just taller versions of what is normally supplied, won't give enough of a gain to be worth the expense.

Walls and floors are bad for reception. You can get what seems like a full speed link with good web browsing, only to have file sharing be completely unreliable.

We have 2 Powerbook G4's at home and the AE streams one (Aluminum) well and the Titanium poorly (both are 1ghz processors). Any reason you can think of for this to be ocurring?

One difference there is that the aluminum Powerbooks all used 802.11g cards, while the Titanium has an 802.11b card. The Titaniums also had some really bad reception issues, so odds are it's not getting enough bandwidth to stream to the devices solidly unless you have the airport really close to the laptop. It's taken Apple many years to finally get wireless reception working well inside a metal case. Their iBook line was always fantastic for reception.

That makes a lot of sense. I tried bringing it closer, but no dice. Any other fixes you can think of? Would using an Apple Base Station instead of generic router help? Or is this an internal issue? Thanks.

It's purely a wireless bandwidth issue, so changing what does routing to the internet won't affect this.

One solution would be to use a card like this in the PCMCIA slot the Titanium has. That way, it can run at 802.11g speeds, and also probably have better reception with the antenna outside the body of the case.

I really appreciate your advice. Is replacing the wifi card a big deal in a Powerbook? Thanks.

As long as you get a PCMCIA card like the one linked above, it will simply slide into the slot on the left side of the laptop, nothing has to be opened up. After that, you may need to install a driver for the card if OS X doesn't see it right away. Driver installs are pretty simple, and should come with instructions on how to run them.

You rock. Thanks

Just ordered it. I obviously now need to upgrade by 802.11b router. Any suggestions. Is additional expense The Apple Extreme base Station worht the cost?

I don't have a clear picture of your setup, can you explain it a bit, including how the Airport Express is connected, and your router.

Very basic. The cable modem for my television is in the bedroom. I'm running an ethernet cable from that to an 802.11b d-link router. The laptops and AE are used in the living room (directly on the other side of the far bedroom wall). Not the best set up, I know. I'm considering moving things around and move (new upgraded) router in the same room as laptops. Can you suggest any particular router?

As for Airport Express, I have it connected to a surge protector close to the printer, stereo and speakers. When the usb printer cable is connected to AE, I can't connect the minijack for Itunes because I get a soft but constant hi pitched distortion coming from the stereo (also a very basic but good 10 year old system: no toslink or the like). I have to remove printer cable to play Itunes (on the Aluminum Powerbook).

Ok, in that case, the card you ordered might not fix the problem until you also get an 802.11g router. Sounds like the Airport Express is just acting like a client connecting to your router wirelessly, so it's also running at 802.11b speeds.

The good news is that a generic 802.11 g router is pretty cheep. Just stick to a normal one, don't go with some "speedboost" or other faster solution, since those all require special cards in the computers too. I don't have any particular recommendations, but if you want the Airport Express to also extend the range of the network a bit, find one that supports WDS.

Any idea what might be causing that hi pitched sound from my tuner when the printer cable & mini-jack are plugged into AE? If I remove the USB printer cable it goes away. Something need to be shielded?

Sounds like a ground loop. Are both devices plugged into the same outlet?

Yes. They are all plugged into a surge protector. I will spilt them up and see if that solves the problem.

No, that would create a possible ground loop. What you had was correct. Assuming of course that the wall outlet was properly grounded in the first place.

I've got an airport express setup at my parents house. The way I solved this problem was to wire in the express to my network. It still provides the WDS features, so users closer to the express will hop onto the express verses my linksys ap.

Wiring in the express solved all my issues with streaming music from a wireless mac book pro to the wireless express, removing one of the wireless hops was all my network needed.