Everything Apple (the Mac heads thread)

Airplay and Airport. Is anyone on here using it?

And how about all the little third party apps such as Airstream, Airfoil, Porthole and Airphones?
And how about Wi-Fi streaming to a TV or projector? What works best?

Keen to hear what setups people have.

it sucks balls. i wanted it to put the peakers and stereo on the other side of the room to the computer without cables. it work for itunes, but not the other sound that comes out of your computer. =POO
if you watch movies, tvcatchup, iplayer or any of that shit it doesn't work.
i sent mine back.

^ all that can be done through airfoil I think?

googles

anyone else heard rumours about a possible retina 13" macbook pro?

would be much more appealing for me than the 15" if it's true.

the delay in airfoil makes using it for movies a bit shit though no?

*havent actually tried it

I use an Apple Airport Express and it works flawlessly. Sound is excellent.

Setting it up was a pain in the arse as I recall.
Apple claim that it will work with WEP WIFI encryption. It just fucking won't. You need to use WPA.
(But then you shouldn't be using WEP anyway, unless you really like connecting to the net with a Nintendo DS.)

Out of the box I think it wants to be the master, assuming that you have no WiFi already, and you need to configure it to work as a slave node on your existing network. The utility is a free download.

The audio port is clever. It's both a normal stereo mini-jack and an optical digital output.
(I bloody wish the modern Apple TV had this feature. I want one but I won't buy one without an analogue audio out.)

You can also connect a USB printer to it and print wirelessly from any device.

There are a number of software applications that work with Airplay and allow you to send all your sound to it. see [ame]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirTunes[/ame] for a list of some.
iTunes supports it natively of course, but so do many applications on iPads and iPhones - Youtube, Garageband, etc.

the combination of iTunes on a computer stuffed with MP3s, an Airport Express hooked up to the stereo and the Apple remote app on your iPhone and iPad is fucking killer.

Would an apple tv do the same thing? Ie could it stream both music and video, or just video?

It streams video and audio, but the only outputs are HDMI and TosLink.
So unless your amp has an optical digital input (and mine doesn't) you either have to have the TV on to listen to music, or you have to buy a digital-analogue convertor

I use both my Apple TVs to stream music, over HDMI, through my AV receiver and to my floor standing speakers. Sounds good but would sound better running through a dedicated amp though.

hm. would need a converter then, but that shouldn't be too much of an issue

without UTFS any hackintosh people here?

I use an Apple Airport Express and it works flawlessly. Sound is excellent.

Setting it up was a pain in the arse as I recall.
Apple claim that it will work with WEP WIFI encryption. It just fucking won't. You need to use WPA.
(But then you shouldn't be using WEP anyway, unless you really like connecting to the net with a Nintendo DS.)

Out of the box I think it wants to be the master, assuming that you have no WiFi already, and you need to configure it to work as a slave node on your existing network. The utility is a free download.

The audio port is clever. It's both a normal stereo mini-jack and an optical digital output.
(I bloody wish the modern Apple TV had this feature. I want one but I won't buy one without an analogue audio out.)

You can also connect a USB printer to it and print wirelessly from any device.

There are a number of software applications that work with Airplay and allow you to send all your sound to it. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirTunes for a list of some.
iTunes supports it natively of course, but so do many applications on iPads and iPhones - Youtube, Garageband, etc.

the combination of iTunes on a computer stuffed with MP3s, an Airport Express hooked up to the stereo and the Apple remote app on your iPhone and iPad is fucking killer.

so, the AE + the software you highlighted would have solved the 'all sound' issues? have they been around long?

(thanks, btw)

@Amey - I've hackintoshed a Dell Mini 10v with Snow Leopard, and at the weekend I installed Lion on a VMWare virtual machine.

@BRM - I installed Airfoil on the Dell hackintosh and it worked fine. That was a fair while ago.

does everything work smooth? I want o build a sub £200 desktop/streamer hackintosh ..

It almost all works. It's fine for web browsing and ScummVM games. It's useful as a cheap portable macbook.
Sound gets really shitty if it wakes up from sleep, so I need to shut it down and restart it instead of just closing the lid, and I've not tried but I understand that the external video output doesn't really work.

It is very useful to have a mac for some tasks, in the same way that it is useful to always keep an old Windows XP machine, but it's slow, the screen is tiny and they keyboard is 9/10s full size.
I can't do serious work on it. That's why I ended up going with a VM install on my main PC.

I just checked the iTunes store and they seem to have discontinued AirFoil. It's not a big problem, you can still buy it off the Rogue Amoeba homepage. But I am seeing rumours on the internets that Apple kicked them off iTunes because the next OS will somehow solve all these issues? A bit brutal of Apple of course, but if they create an solution then I'm all for it.

EDIT: Just called apple, supposedly an upgrade to Mountain Lion means you can stream from Spotify on your laptop trough Airplay. Seems to me that upgrading to Mountain Lion from any OS in the past few years will cost you roughly the same as AirFoil anyway.

Sorry to dumb it down here. I have been pondering the combo of Apple TV and projector. But if I get this set up I cannot play dodgy downloaded TV series on the projector via AirPlay? Thing is, I don't have a TV and I really don't want one.

EDIT: Um, yeah ... is this thing a solution? http://www.beamer-app.com/
Would work for streaming dodgy content to a telly, but not projector right?

Further on from yesterdays question what SSD would you guys recommend for my Macbook around 250gb? I'd imagine that It's a SATA 2 connection but would that save much money going for 2 over 3?

There's an ebuyer one which has just come under £100 :

http://www.ebuyer.com/394450-kingston-256gb-v200-ssd-sv200s3-256g

Spenceey, I just did the SSD thing with my macbook pro,
downloaded carbon cloner, bought an hard drive enclosure,
this one
[ame="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004OXY1TU/ref=oh_details_o01_s00_i00"]http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004OXY1TU/ref=oh_details_o01_s00_i00[/ame]

cloned the old hard drive, took out old hard drive, put in new SSD,
this one
[ame="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004W2JL2A/ref=oh_details_o01_s00_i03"]http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004W2JL2A/ref=oh_details_o01_s00_i03[/ame]

bobs your uncle, pretty much a piece of piss.

Also upped the ram to its full capacity and its quick as anything..

Also if you are replacing the original hard drive on your mac you do need to make sure it's a 9.5mm one not a 7.5mm one as the size difference means you have to fudge how it sits in the hard drive bay..

Did you tidy up the HDD at all? Only reason I ask is that apart from all my music - around 50gb there isn't much I wish to keep.

Would that warrent a fresh install?

If you don't want to keep anything apart from the music as fresh install would be great!

Spenceey, just cloned and replaced. A fresh install wasn't what I was looking for.

anyone suggest a good tv to use as a monitor with an imac?

sound quality not essential as the audio will be going through a stereo anyway

Can't really go wrong with LG or samsung DJ. Will it be through HDMI or divi?

what would the difference be? am a huge cretin where computers are involved

http://www.richersounds.com/product/lcd-led-tvs/samsung/le32d580/sams-le32d580

http://www.richersounds.com/product/lcd-led-tvs/sharp/lc32sh130/shar-lc32sh130k

http://www.richersounds.com/product/tv---all/samsung/ue32eh5000/sams-ue32eh5000

is the extra money worth it?