Apple TV

[rare]

I was looking at getting an Airport Express to stream music from my macbook air to my hifi, but I kept reading lots of reports of jitter and dropouts.

The TV seems to be better in this respect, and offers more functionality for not a great deal more money. Im trying to find out though if I can just play music through it without having the TV on? I don't own any iOS products, other than iTunes on my macbook air. So can I just load up iTunes select what I want and ask it to play out via the apple tv?

Sorry, I just seem to be confusing myself, especially as they only seem to advertise iOS devices as acting as the remote.

 

[rare]

Probably be better suited to the Apple hardware section *doh*

 

[Caged]

Yes, you can AirPlay audio to it. It's only got HDMI out though so you'll need to deal with that somehow.

I've never had an issue with AirPort Express audio by the way.

Edit: I'm a liar, it has optical.

 

[rare]

Thanks, that's good. Still undecided what to do, pay more for the extra functions of the tv, which I may never use any way, or just get the express.

 

[oceaness]

I've made myself an 8TB media server out of some old PC bits, that runs iTunes just to feed all my Music/Movies/TV Shows to a couple of Apple TV's.

You can send output from iTunes to Apple TV yes.

The only thing I'd like now is a proper AV Receiver so I don't have to have the TV on when I just want to listen to some music. Unfortunately I don't have an optical input on my current sound system.

I am considering one of these for the time being.

The only thing I would say is all this requires Apple's Bonjour service to work reliably under Windows and I don't seem to be having much luck with that.

 

[rare]

Thanks for the advice guys. I just realised my three week old Sony 840 av amp has airplay built in!! Result! I didn't even know what I had bought, and I was so close to spending £80. Working perfectly, well pleased.