I hate it when companies lock you into their proprietary crap. For example, I bought an Apple Airport Express a few months ago so that I could play my music over my stereo without cables. Everything works great until you try to use it with anything other than iTunes.
iTunes is horrible at managing streaming playlists, and since I never listen to music stored locally, it can be a big pain. So my player of choice is WinAMP. There doesn’t seem to be a plugin available to output directly to AirTunes though, so here’s how to connect WinAMP through iTunes to AirTunes…
- Setup a Shoutcast streaming server
- Pump music from WinAMP to the Shoutcast server
- Have iTunes listen to the Shoutcast server and output to AirTunes
- Lame, but doable, enjoy.
Thanks to Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu from here for this workaround.
Or you can use oAEP a program that connects to an Airport Express wirelessly and plays music and sound from Windows.
You can use any player you want, Winamp, media player…
Find it here:
http://www.ovesens.net/oAEP
After looking at all of the available options out there, I figured I needed to take matters into my own hands and make a proper Winamp plug-in that streams audio to the AirPort Express. The initial public version is now available:
http://emilles.dyndns.org/software/out_apx.html
Please let me know if you have tried it and like it (or don’t). Or if something was broken. It should be pretty solid…