Highs and lows with Apple's AirPort Express, Part 1

I had high hopes for Apple's AirPort Express, a device that lets you stream music from an iTunes-enabled PC (or Macintosh) wirelessly to a home stereo system. But the joys of listening to my iTunes-purchased songs on the stereo quickly turned to despair when I tried connecting the system to my existing wireless network.

Let's back up a bit. The AirPort Express is a device that plugs into a power outlet and has three ports - an Ethernet port to connect to a broadband (cable or DSL) modem; an audio out port (to connect to your stereo system); and a USB port (to connect to a USB printer). While it looks like a power-line adapter, it's still a wireless access point. (If the design bothers you, there's always an extended power cable that you can attach so the "box" doesn't attach to the wall).

These three features are nothing new; you can find wireless media players, wireless access points and USB print servers from Linksys, D-Link, SMC, Netgear, etc. But Apple decided to combine these three functions into one slickly designed device.

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I had high hopes for Apple's AirPort Express, a device that lets you stream music from an iTunes-enabled PC (or Macintosh) wirelessly to a home stereo system. But the joys of listening to my iTunes-purchased songs on the stereo quickly turned to despair when I tried connecting the system to my existing wireless network.

Let's back up a bit. The AirPort Express is a device that plugs into a power outlet and has three ports - an Ethernet port to connect to a broadband (cable or DSL) modem; an audio out port (to connect to your stereo system); and a USB port (to connect to a USB printer). While it looks like a power-line adapter, it's still a wireless access point. (If the design bothers you, there's always an extended power cable that you can attach so the "box" doesn't attach to the wall).

These three features are nothing new; you can find wireless media players, wireless access points and USB print servers from Linksys, D-Link, SMC, Netgear, etc. But Apple decided to combine these three functions into one slickly designed device.

Apple gives you several network design scenarios - depending on whether you have an existing wireless network. To keep it simple and just listen to iTunes through a stereo, you can avoid connecting to your existing wireless network (and your broadband connection) altogether. We tried that first.

Setup was relatively easy - just plug the AirPort Express into a wall, connect one end of the stereo cable to the AirPort Express, and the other end to the audio-in port on our stereo system, and then install the software on our PC that housed iTunes. Because the stereo cable is relatively short, you'll need to position the AirPort Express near your stereo, as opposed to hooking it up like with other wireless access points.

Our first sign of trouble came when Apple's AirPort Express Assistant software failed to install on the PC - we could only install the Apple AirPort Admin utility. But when we tried installing Express Assistant on a machine that didn't already have iTunes installed, the AirPort Express Assistant software did install. Yes, for some reason, Express Assistant conflicted with iTunes.

Using the AirPort Admin utility, we could detect the base station (the name popped up in the window when we started the tool), give it a name and connect to the system to start streaming our music. On our iTunes-enabled PC, we had to disconnect from our existing wireless network and move to the wireless connection provided by the AirPort Express. When we did this, we were able to listen to our music, but because we weren't connected to the regular network, we lost our Internet access.

So the next step was to try and integrate the AirPort Express into our existing wireless network. This is where the bad news began. More next time.

Read more about home networks in Network World's Home Networks section.