Anyone pick up the Airport Express (Apple iTunes wireless thing) yet?

[Slacker]

I'm thinking about grabbing one this weekend, but I was curious if anyone here had any experiences worth sharing.

If you haven't heard of it and you're curious, you can read about it here:

http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/

Sounds pretty sweet - basically you just broadcast whatever you're playing on your computer wirelessly to a stereo or whatever in any room of the house. Nice! I had two main questions though -

1) Can you play music on the computer and through the Airport in the other room at the same time? Or do you have to choose one or the other? If you really had more money than sense could you play music to more than one Airport at once?

2) Does it have to connect to a stereo, or will a pair of computer speakers work?

If anyone knows the answers to these questions, thanks in advance! If not, I'll figure it out and post the answers.

[Teine]

Unfortunately, I don't think Apple is shipping them quite yet. I've been considering it, but if you try and order one through their online store, it shows a shipping date of mid-July.

A couple more weeks and I'll have one, though.

[rjung]

Originally Posted by Slacker

1) Can you play music on the computer and through the Airport in the other room at the same time? Or do you have to choose one or the other?

I believe it's one or the other.

Originally Posted by Slacker

If you really had more money than sense could you play music to more than one Airport at once?

No.

Originally Posted by Slacker

2) Does it have to connect to a stereo, or will a pair of computer speakers work?

No reason it shouldn't work with any ol' speakers you can plug in.

[SolGrundy]

Just speculation, because I don't own one:

Originally Posted by Slacker

1) Can you play music on the computer and through the Airport in the other room at the same time? Or do you have to choose one or the other? If you really had more money than sense could you play music to more than one Airport at once?

From this page, it looks like you have to choose one output from iTunes from the combo box at the bottom of the iTunes window. That implies to me that you can only have it going to the computer speakers or to your stereo.

Originally Posted by Slacker

2) Does it have to connect to a stereo, or will a pair of computer speakers work?

It looks like just a standard audio-out jack, so I can't think why it wouldn't connect to speakers. May not be amplified, though.

I'm very tempted to get one, but I'm also reluctant to give Apple any more of my money than I already have. I think in the past few months I've paid for a nice renovation of Steve Jobs' house.

[wheelie]

I'm thinking about going ahead and getting an Airport Extreme card so I'll suffer less sticker shock from the Airport Express when it ships. The optional connection kit includes an optical toslink cable for full digital transfer.
Now I suppose I'll have to buy another hard drive and re-rip all of my cd's using ALE lossless encoding for AirTunes use. Maybe I'll use the money I'm not spending on anti-virus software.

[rjung]

Originally Posted by SolGrundy

It looks like just a standard audio-out jack, so I can't think why it wouldn't connect to speakers.

Just to nitpick, but it's a combined analog and optical mini-jack; I think someone said you can get 5.1 output out of it.