While working late on a presentation while listening to the classical channel from grooveshark, I started to wonder if there is a gadget that either: a) plays music available from a shared folder on a network or b) receives commands remotely from a computer.
This would be pretty cool, it would allow me to control the music of the whole house centrally from my computer. I remember that a digital photo portrait that I had a few years ago had a similar feature — it could read its pictures from a designated shared folder in a network, using a specialized protocol. So I imagine there is something similar for music.
The “server side commands” would be better though, because then I could do fancy stuff as setting cronjobs from my computer to change the ambience at certain times, etc.
Or maybe I’m playing too much Shadowrun :-)
You haven’t heard about Sonos, have you? http://www.sonos.com/
iTunes/AirPort Express/Apple TV/Apple Remote also do the same, but they are limited to iTunes shares.
Apple has devices that do this. Both the AppleTV and the Airport express allow pretty much any mac software (iTunes, any iOS application) to push audio (and video in the case of the appleTV) to it.
Be it songs, tv shows, or video game background noise. My wife often forgets it’s running on her iPad, and i’ll hear the sounds of Carcassonne coming through my speaker unit.
Yeah, the apple solution requires a homogeneous system, and I’m not too keen on it. I would buy a iWhateverAudio if it connected transparently with the hardware/software I already have, but it doesn’t seem to be the case.
The Sonos looks really cool (their website is kinda hard to navigate), although a bit on the expensive side. I like that they can read music from a SMB share, that is kinda what I was looking for.