I guess I've been reading Make too long, but when I wanted to hear Internet radio in the spare room the other day, I quickly devised this wacky solution:
The Apple AirPort Express receives the Wi-Fi music signal from iTunes, converts it to analog, and then injects it into the old boombox through a car cassette adapter. The belt raises the tweeters to brighten the sound.
All components were items I salvaged from closets, including the boombox-with-no-line-input, the Old Belt, and the cassette adapter, which I hadn't used since I'd replaced my factory car stereos.
The AirPort Express had also spent its first year in the closet after I failed to get it working with my non-Apple router. Every few months I'd haul it out, blast it with configuration commands via Ethernet, and then give up in frustration before finally stumbling on the correct settings. (I forget what they were, but it involved lying to the software.)
Here's a more heroic image of the setup:
Come to think of it, hiding a Wi-Fi speaker in a closet could be pretty fun on Halloween...
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Audio
Comments (2)
Read More Entries by David Battino.
@Geoff: Thanks for mentioning AirFoil. That would be a good way to listen to Pandora.com, which I use more than iTunes’ Internet radio.
There's a software utility, called AirFoil, that lets a PC or Mac send any audio source to the AirPort Express. It tricks the AirPort into thinking the audio is coming from iTunes, even though it's coming from some other source, such as streaming audio from an internet radio station, a CD playing from the drive in the computer, or any other audio source. It's easy to use and well worth the relatively nominal cost.