Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Now Streaming w/Airport Express

Ignoring the whole "locked into Apple and iTunes" discussion, this is definitely cool. I finally bought and installed an Airport Express yesterday to stream my iTunes library to another room. I'd messed around with (attempting to) connect TVersity and even Window Media Player to my Xbox 360, with limited success. That experience pales in comparison to using the Remote app on my iPod Touch.

My iTunes library is composed of either high bit rate MP3 (256 or better, usually 320), or (mostly) files converted from FLAC.

Since I've given up on Apple ever supporting FLAC natively in iTunes, here's my simple conversion process, FWIW:

1) Download/install free JetAudio. Nice player anyway. Good tools, including conversion.

2) Using JetAudio, convert FLAC to WMA9, 320 CBR. JetAudio remembers the output type, and the default folder, <My Music>\iTunes\iTunes Music\Automatically Add to iTunes. This is a special folder that few seem to know about. iTunes monitors this folder and will automatically convert any files stored within it. No interaction by me required.

iTunes converts these WMA9 files into very acceptable 256 VBR AAC files.

It's worth noting that iTunes does the best job of using the monitored folder by not populating it when iTunes is running, as it seems to miss the odd file that way. Instead, close iTunes and then do the FLAC to WMA conversions which populate that folder. When conversions are done, open iTunes and let it do its thing.

I connected the Airport to the receiver using an optical cable for the best sound. The cable was cheap on Amazon: <$10.

All in all, good fun. Even the Mrs. likes using it!

I'm curious why you wouldn't convert FLAC to ALAC, at least that way they're both lossless, but otherwise, sounds good to me!

I can only plead ignorance, as I'd been "stuck" using JetAudio for so long (and it only has so many output conversion types in its free version), that I didn't even look into other formats.

What do you use to convert FLAC to ALAC Ken?

I don't (I've always used iTunes!), but a quick google search turns up a number of options.

Yes, I found a few that way already.

FWIW, I should note that all of the CDs that I've imported directly to iTunes have been done using the lossless format (resulting in typically 800+ kbps files).