Apple AirPort Express’ AirTunes Feature Explained
By Alexander Grundner |
June 8th, 2004 
Jason Snell over at Macworld talks it up with Greg Joswiak, Apple’s Vice President of Hardware Product Marketing, and gathers a few more details about Apple’s new AirPort Express (a mini plug-mounted 802.11g base station) and how its AirTunes audio streaming feature actually works.
“Essentially, AirTunes is a method of creating remote speakers for a copy of iTunes, and sending data to those remote speakers via a wireless network. That network can be formed by connecting an AirPort Express to another AirPort Express, to an AirPort Extreme Base Station, or even to a non-apple 802.11b or 802.11g access point.
When you select an AirPort Express device in the new pop-up menu at the bottom of the iTunes 4.6 interface, that device essentially replaces your Mac’s speakers as the audio-output source for whatever you do in iTunes. At that point you can do anything you’d normally do in iTunes — play music from your Library, from someone else’s library, or from your iPod; play an Internet radio stream; even play an audiobook. The sound won’t come out of your Mac — it’ll come out of the speakers attached to the AirPort Express.
iTunes does the heavy lifting. When iTunes plays back standard audio content (AAC, MP3, audiobooks, music streams), it decompresses those file formats and creates what’s essentially a raw, uncompressed audio stream. That stream is compressed on the fly using Apple’s Lossless Compression, encrypted, and sent to the AirPort Express. AirPort Express decrypts the stream, decodes it, and outputs it in either analog format (if you plug in a standard analog mini jack) or as a digital PCM stream (if you plug in a mini-sized optical cable, which you can get from most major cable suppliers or straight from Apple for $39).”
News Link: Jason Snell, “How AirTunes Works,” Macworld, June 7, 2004.
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