Wednesday, January 11, 2012

New music jukebox

Well, I finally did it!!! I actually bought an Apple product, an iPad 2.



Here's my reasoning. I used to have my music stored on a computer and used a program called MediaMonday as the jukebox. It was connected to our stereo via audio cable. All this worked fine until the hard drive containing the music died. Well, I didn't do anything about it for quite a while, but finally started thinking that we own all these CDs but they're diffiecut to manage and store in the living room. I started looking around for some sort of small device (computer) that I could use for this purpose. Hopefully putting it on a shelf along with the stereo equipment. Finally I ran across an ad for the iPad and started thinking or wondering if it could do the job for me.

I investigated quite a bit, even calling Apple directly, but couldn't get a definite answer if it could work for me or not. I finally had to drive an hour to an Apple store where this cute little french gal convinced me that, yes it can do that. Note, her good looks, etc. didn't have any baring on my decision. :-)

I got it home and started playing and after several calls to Apple tech support it is finally working. I have it setup like this:

All music (250 CDs) are stored on a Windows computer using iTunes
My stereo is plugged into an Airport Express (Apple device)
The Airport Express has an ethernet cable to my existing network (to the PC)
The Airport Express has a wireless network to the iPad.

Using the Music app on the iPad, I can play all of my iTunes library on the PC through the wireless connection to the stereo. It's pretty slick.

My only real complaint is with the Music app on the iPad. If you display the music by genere, it gives you a list of ALL songs in that genere. I think it should give you a list of all artists and then albums in that genere. You see, in 250 CDs we have a LOT of songs in an individual genere and then all get listed. :-(

Now I need to find out what else this little thing can do..

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am impressed! So how about just viewing www.rara.com? It really won't hurt!

Tommy said...

I have looked at rara.com. It's just like Pandora that allows you to stream music from the Internet.

The set up that I have is for my own personal music collection, not what someone else decided to put on the net. I do use Pandora as well for lots of other musics.

Thanks

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

If you sync the music to the iPad, then it can play independently of network and PC.

Then an iPod Nano can do that too, I use that for my Hifi speakers (via a good amp).
I hope you're getting more use out of your iPad, it can do so many thing well.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Congrats on the iPad, it rocks.