This is pretty important as it effectively halves your dependence on wireless which is inevitably flakey, particularly if you live in a built up area or use you microwave much. I use an old 2007 macbook pro, configured with NoSleep and power-saving disabled, so it keeps running when the lid’s closed.– The server is connected to the router via a homeplug. Two in the lounge and one in the kitchen, bathroom, study, wardrobe.The below describes the setup and how to get it all to play nicely:– Like Sonos, you need a media server to coordinate everything and it really needs to be physically wired to your router. This was largely because I wanted sound integrated sound in five rooms, wanted to reuse some of the kit I already had, didn’t want to fork out Sonos prices (Sonos quote was pushing £2k and I ended up spending about £100 on the core setup) and because I kinda liked the idea of building something rather than buying it in.This actually took quite a bit of fiddling around to get right so this post covers where I’ve got to so far.I live in a flat (~150sqm) and have installed 6 linked speakers over five rooms. IPhone into AirPlay speaker and listen to music that played on Mac, Airfoil from.I chose not to go down the Sonos route for the audio in my flat.I use a Philips Fidelio AD7000W which is nice and thin (it sits in a kitchen cupboard), has impressive sound for its size and only cost £40 on amazon marketplace (a second). The killer feature of doing it yourself is that airplay speakers are a few years old now and there are quite a few decent ones out there for around £50. It definitely sounds good, but it cost twice the price of everything else put together so I’m not sure I’d buy it again.– Two bargain basement, heavily reduced airplay units. Airfoil itself won’t run on Snow Leopard so this wasn’t an option for the server, but the Airfoil speaker app works fine.– Canton Musicbox Air – an expensive piece of kit I bought on a bit of a whim.I should add that both of these are heavily reduced at the moment because they are getting old and the Contour has the old-style, 30pin iphone dock on it – it’s also kinda ugly so I have it tucked away.– Iphone 3 connected to some Bose computer speakers I had already. The Contour is also the only unit I’ve found with an ethernet port (useful as you can add a homeplug, but I found this wasn’t necessary once the media server was attached to the router, unless the microwave is on). I certainly prefer the crispness of the Fidelio despite less bass. This goes pretty loud although I find the sound a little muffled.This allows you almost complete control of Spotify but it’s not as good as the native Spotify app. I control everything from my Iphone 5, listening mostly to ITunes and Spotify so the closest to a one-stop-shop is Remoteless for Spotify. There is no single, one-stop-shop app for all your music needs (that I’ve found anyway). This is the bit where Sonos has the edge. I don’t restart the server much so it’s not really a problem but I’ll replace it with a raspberry pi at some point.– Finally you need to control it all. One annoying thing about the Iphone app is that if Airfoil is restarted on the server the iphone doesn’t automatically reconnect, you have to go tell it to.
![]() Airfoil Airplay Speaker Cuts In And Out 2017 How To Get ItAlso of note are Airfoil Remote (nice interface for controlling Airfoil itself but it’s ability to control apps is very limited) and Spot Remote which is largely similar to Remoteless but without the Airfoil integration.OK so this is the bargain basement option. When sourcing from ITunes I switch to the good old ITunes Remote App and use this to play my music library as well as Intenet radio. It also has apps for a range of media sources (Pandora, Deezer etc). In honesty though I quite enjoy the fiddling □A note on interference and cut outs: These happen from time to time. Discounting my splurge on the Conton, the system described here is about £100. The Sonos alternative system, which would have involved 2 Sonos bridges (for the two existing stereos), Play 3’s for the each of the periphery rooms and a play 5 in the lounge, would have pushed two grand. However, all round, it works pretty well. Since then dropouts are very rare.If you don’t fancy the faff, you want something seamless and money isn’t an issue I’d stick with Sonos, it just works. The most significant change, regarding dropouts, was to connect the server to the router via a homeplug. I use a repeater, connected via a homeplug. Having a good signal around the place is obviously important. IT-Tage-2018: The Future of Applications is Streaming Devoxx-2019: Streams vs Serverless: Friend or Foe? However if you don’t mind this, fancy something a little more DIY and have a few bits and bobs lying around the Airplay route works for a fraction of the price. She still connects her iphone directly to each of the airplay units. ![]() ![]() JavaOne-2011: Balancing Replication and Partitioning in a Distributed Java Database QCon-2012: Progressive Architectures at RBS ( video) QCon-2012: Where Big Data meets Big Database ( video) BigDataCon-2013: The Return of Big Iron? JAXLondon-2015: Intuitions for Scaling Data-Centric Architectures ( video) Snow app for macICST-2011: Test-Oriented Languages: a new era? CoSIG-2011: Oracle Coherence Implementation Patterns (Special Interest Group) UCL-2011: A Paradigm Shift: The Increasing Dominance of Memory-Oriented Solutions for High Performance Data Access Elements of Scale: Composing and Scaling Data Platforms (2015) The Benefits of “In-Memory” Data are Often Overstated (2016) Brunel-2007: Architecture and Design in Industry RBS-2009: Data Grids with Oracle Coherence Birkbeck-2011: Data Storage for Extreme Use Cases Shared Disk Architectures: An Independent View (2009) Is the Traditional Database a Thing of the Past? (2009) The Rebirth of the In-Memory Database (2011) Where does Big Data meet Big Database? (2012)
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