fuzzyness

Air Tunes and Airfoil

3·Nov·07

Previous to changing my main computer to a MacBook Pro, all our music was stored and served from a PowerMac G5. This was handy as it had loads of hard drive space and was always on, meaning that I could share the G5 iTunes library over our wireless network (via Airport Express) and play music all over the house, from any of our Macs, into any stereo system plugged into an Airport Express plug.

Replacing the G5 with a MacBook Pro posed a couple of challenges to this nice-and-easy system. For one, I might easily have taken the MBP out to a client, or the lid just might be shut.

Solution: transfer the physical iTunes library over to the Mac Mini instead. That’s always on, and although it hasn’t got a great deal of hard drive space, it’s got just enough to hold the 58GB of music files (with option to extend out to an external drive soon). We can now continue to play music from the shared library, from any Mac around the house.

However, now that means that the music files don’t get backed up – the G5 (and now the MBP) is plugged into an external drive and is backed up each night via SuperDuper but the Mac Mini isn’t. If it dies – so do the tunes.

Solution: I’ve partioned the external drive into 2 partitions – one for the SuperDuper clone, and one for iTunes library media storage. Any new music downloads or CD rips will take place on the MBP anyway, so I’m following a workflow of popping new music files onto the iTunes partition, and then sending the files over to the Mac Mini over the network to join the main library. Sounds clutsy but worth it for back up peace of mind.

Another issue is volume controls – I’d got very used to sitting at the G5 and controlling the music volume using the Apple keyboard controls, leaving the main speakers at a consistent volume. However, that doesn’t work when playing music using Air Tunes over the network. Hmm…

Solution: I’d almost forgotten about Airfoil, a handy little utility from Rogue Ameoba which allows you to transmit the sound output from any app over Air Tunes, rather than just iTunes. If you use Airfoil, rather than iTunes, to play music wirelessly from a shared library, there’s an option in the ‘Speakers’ toolbar menu to ‘Link volume to System’. Lo, we have keyboard volume control back again!

The only slight issue here is that turning the volume up this way increases the volume of system alerts through the computer’s own speakers too. That’s easy: just alter the volume of alerts in the ‘Sounds’ menu in ‘System Preferences’ and you’re good to go.

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