I recently posted a pic­ture to Insta­gram of my wife’s iPad using the Apple Remote app for iOS and show­ing how you can con­trol play­back & audio lev­els on mul­ti­ple devices — in my case an Apple TV, Air­port Express and an iMac.

Update: As of 2012-​​07-​​25, Apple has released Moun­tain Lion (go get it!) so this guide is sub­ject to changes depend­ing on what ver­sion of OS X you have. I’ll be writ­ing a new ver­sion when iOS 6 is released in the fall to cover all the changes to Air­Play and both oper­at­ing sys­tems. CE

I got a few ques­tions about the setup so I thought I’d do a quick writeup here to explain how it works.

Update Feb 13^th, 2012 If you’d like to be able to select mul­ti­ple speak­ers from your iOS device, which Apple cur­rently doesn’t allow, check out Rogue Amoeba’s post using their tools Air­foil and Air­foil speak­ers.

Air­Play

The soft­ware con­nect­ing every­thing together is called Air­Play¹. It’s Apple’s soft­ware that’s designed to allow you to stream from one device to another — com­puter to Air­port Express or iPhone to Apple TV, etc.

Com­puter

You’ll need some sort of com­puter run­ning iTunes. In our case, I typ­i­cally use our iMac but you can also have mul­ti­ple sources use the same con­fig depend­ing on where you are in the house — you just can’t have them stream at the same time, obvi­ously. It’s first come, first serve with AirPlay.

iTunes 10.x should work fine.

iOS Device

All cur­rent iPad, iPod touch, and iPhones are able to sup­port Air­Play. What I was demo­ing in my orig­i­nal photo, how­ever, wasn’t stream­ing from a iOS device — it was just run­ning the Apple Remote app for iOS which allows you to con­trol iTunes on a com­puter on your local WiFi net­work. Choose songs, pod­casts, songs, etc. to play as well as where you want the media to play/​stream to.

Not required to use an Air­port Express, Apple TV or Air­Play — just the coolest way to use it all.

Apple TV

The Apple TV, sell­ing for $119CDN, is yet another box to con­nect to your flat panel TV via a HDMI cable. ² With recent addi­tions to the Apple TV, includ­ing Net­flix, NHL & MLB, Flickr, Vimeo & YouTube, it’s a very com­pelling alter­na­tive to your stan­dard cable box in terms of the enter­tain­ment value. No, you can’t watch an episode of Com­mu­nity live when it airs³ — but there’s plenty of other options for what you might want to watch.

iCloud allows your recent pho­tos from iOS devices to be auto­mat­i­cally shown on the Apple TV. Air­Play and Air­Play Mir­ror­ing⁴ allow you to mir­ror what’s on your iOS device to your TV — play a game on your big screen TV, for example.

I’ve talked to many peo­ple about the Apple TV to peo­ple and peo­ple gen­er­ally don’t really get how mag­i­cal it is until they see it in per­son — par­tic­u­larly when paired with an iPhone or iPad.⁵

Air­port Express

The Air­port Express is a device that plugs into the wall for power and has an audio out jack to con­nect to a set of speak­ers or stereo. Audio then can be streamed via Air­Play to the Air­port Express.

How It All Happens

We use our iMac as the main library for music and videos. So we have your typ­i­cal iTunes playlists full of var­i­ous songs and a few videos and podcasts.

The eas­i­est way to set it up is to use Home Shar­ing. In iTunes go to the Advanced menu and click on Turn on Home Shar­ing.

I won’t walk through the com­plete Home Shar­ing setup — you can visit Apple’s sup­port page for more details but suf­fice to say it makes set­ting up mul­ti­ple iOS devices much eas­ier to use Home Sharing.

After set­ting up your iTunes to be enabled for AirPlay/​Home Shar­ing, you need to add that iTunes library to your iOS device (iPhone, etc.).

Again, refer back to the Apple sup­port page for more instruc­tions on set­ting up Home Shar­ing. But once it’s all setup, you’ll see the playlists of your iTunes library appear in the Apple Remote App on your iOS device.

Click the lit­tle TV icon in the top right cor­ner and you’ll see a list of all the devices (Air­port Express, Apple TV) on your WiFi net­work that, in my case any­way, are setup with Home Shar­ing.⁶

Each device can have a vol­ume level that’s inde­pen­dent of the other devices, includ­ing the source com­puter. In our setup, we have the Air­port Express upstairs hooked up to a cou­ple of old speak­ers, the Apple TV is in the base­ment hooked up to our TV and then the iMac is in the office.

So if we wanted, we can have the same music play­ing through­out the house all play­ing from one cen­tral spot with­out run­ning wires every­where to speak­ers. What’s really incred­i­ble is how it all plays in sync — the Air­port Express plays at the same time as the Apple TV.

How Much?

We didn’t buy all these things at once and acquired them over time.⁷ Here’s a rough guide to pricing/​options.

• iMac Obvi­ously any recent com­puter will work. Even a Win­dows machine that runs iTunes, though I’ve never tested it. The iMac starts at $1,199CDN from Apple
• iOS device **iPod touch Starts at $199CDN for the 8GB model or $299CDN for the 32GB model, iPad 2 starts at $519CDN for the 16GB, $619CDN for the 32GB or $719CDN for the 64GB mod­els or the iPhone 4/​4S⁸
• Apple TV Avail­able for $119CDN though it can some­times be found for $99CDN on Apple’s clear­ance sec­tion of their store.
• Air­port Express Avail­able for $99CDN

You’ll need some sort of TV if you pick up an Apple TV. A set of speak­ers if you want to use an Air­port Express. Your mileage may vary.

Usage

We use it nearly every day. It works really well — except when we microwave some­thing with our Pana­sonic microwave. It always kills the audio and we have to restart play­ing music once the microwav­ing is done. Lately the iPad has, seem­ingly at ran­dom, stopped play­ing music as well. Over­all though it’s a great setup for lis­ten­ing to music or pod­casts around your house.

Also great for play­ing the kids music down­stairs on the iMac/​Apple TV with some­thing dif­fer­ent on the Air­port Express upstairs.