Archive for the ‘Apple Byte’ Category
Apple Airplay Tips
Airplay is an excellent product that received a big update in the November 2010 iOS update. Today I spent some time testing Apple’s Airplay to understand the best way to use Airplay and multiple Apple TV products in a multi-room music system. Here are some of the key points I found.
- From an iDevice you can only stream to one Apple TV at a time.
- You cannot stream multiple apps from one iDevice to multiple Apple TVs.
- The Pandora app is a unique stream to each device so you cannot synchronize Pandora on multiple Apple TVs from different iDevices or your computer and an iDevice.
- In order to share your iTunes library, iTunes must be open and running on the computer with the iTunes library that you want to play music files from.
- Apple TV with support multiple iTunes libraries from a single computer using different user accounts with different iTunes libraries. You need to use the same Apple ID for each user and the Apple TV to work with Apple’s Home Sharing protocol.
- Airplay does support covert art and other metadata when streaming to multiple speakers from your computer
In summary, I think the Apple TV still provides access to an enormous amount of web content using and iDevice and Airplay. It is an excellent source device in any size whole house music system. While these upgrades to Airplay have provided a big leap in functionality for the Apple TV it is not yet the complete solution for a whole house music system all by itself.
You can email your thoughts to me at travis@solsticemultimedia.com
iPad wireless network
Solstice Multimedia has been contacted by a number of our clients that have purchased Apple Ipad’s to upgrade their wireless networks. We can help.