Wicked Home Sound System (HACK)
Last night I spent some time rewiring my entire sound system so that I could do something pretty awesome. I live in a duplex (2 story apartment) and I throw parties every once in a while at my place. Something that’s always bothered me was that I didn’t have a solid way to get the same music playing on both floors. I know I could just run speaker wire, but I have two separate stereos (1 for each floor). So how do I get them to play the same music in sync?
I ran across This Article on LifeHacker.com and it made my day. I was so giddy that I immediately started working on it when I got home from work.
In essence, it not only allows me to have the same music playing through both stereos, but I can also control the whole thing with my iPhone! How bad ass is that?! (oh, and I already had all the required pieces, so it cost me nothing =)
In the end, here’s what I did:
First I flashed my Linksys router with the Tomato firmware and set it up as a distributed wireless router (I also boosted the signal strength from 45mw to 100 =). Next, I found my Airport Express and configured that to link to my router. This stuff was pretty simple and worked the first time through.
To get the music to my stereo upstairs (where the airport express is), I was going to have my old Powerbook stream music through iTunes to the Airport Express router, which is hooked up to the stereo. iTunes allows you to connect to multiple “speakers”, so I streamed it, and I also plugged in a cable to the headphone jack of the laptop. This cord then connected to the stereo downstairs.
This took me a bit to get working (couple of hours), because the HDD on the Powerbook was fried and wouldn’t book. To get around this problem, I disassembled the casing of the laptop and disconnected the HDD. Put it all back together and then install OS X on an external HDD. BTW, to install OS X on an external HDD, it has to be connected via FireWire. USB will NOT work. I had an old 80gb external FireWire drive, so I just used that. Once OS X was installed I copied the contents of my iPod to the HDD so all my MP3’s were on the laptop. Should I want to upgrade later, all I have to do is copy over the OS to a new, larger FireWire HDD. Man I love OS X!
The last step was to hook my iPhone up to the iTunes on the Powerbook to control it wirelessly over the WLAN. Super easy with the Remote app.
That’s all there was to it! Now I can choose songs / playlists, skip through songs, control volume to both stereos with one fader… all from the phone in my pocket! ROCK!
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