neomorphic

I decided to buy an Airport Express today as I really wanted to get the most from my stereo and the remote application (warning: crappy iTunes link) on my iPod touch. A lot of the reviews claim that it is really hard to setup and a lot of them claim that it is really easy. I figured that since I am fairly tech savvy it really shouldn't be a problem. I mean how hard can it be to hook up a network enabled device to my existing wireless network? As it turns out, this device caused me loads of trouble during setup. The difficulty was second only to creating a bridged network between two wireless routers from different manufacturers.

First of all you must make sure that the device is allowed to access your wireless network. This was easy to do and took a few seconds on the admin page for my router. Then install the airport utility, also easy. Finally open the utility and setup your airport express and you are done, or are you....

The first hurdle to overcome was getting the express to show up in the list of devices. Not only would it not show up, it just flashed an annoying amber light at me. For some reason it would not show up in the list, unless I enabled the wireless network on my mac mini. When I finally got it to show up it told me I would have to connect to it directly. Fine, I did that and at last I was at a configuration screen. I had two choices at this point, pick 'manual' setup or hit the 'continue' button. Assuming that apple would do the right thing at this point, I hit continue. A few dialogs popped up asking me how I would like to configure the device and I choose to add it to my existing network as opposed to create a new one. It found my network and entered the WEP key. "All good" I thought to myself, but sadly no. The device started flashing amber again and dropped off the network never to be seen again. This resulted in the application of a paper clip to the reset switch and restarting the airport utility again.

Ok, second attempt. This time, I decided not to trust apple to do the right thing and went for manual configuration, the option I should have chosen in the first place. This time I was allowed to configure the network by hand and make sure that everything worked. I add the ssid, wep key and password then hit the 'update' button. Huraah, it worked and I had a working Airport Express. Now all I had to do was play some music by selecting the speakers from the drop down list on the bottom right of the iTunes window... but there was no drop down menu. There didn't seem to be any advice in the manual so I resorted to searching google for an answer. Finally someone suggested that I need to look in the advanced tab of iTunes and make sure that the 'Look for remote speakers...' option was ticked. Sure enough it wasn't, but ticking it suddenly provided me with a drop down menu. Selecting the speakers and hitting play brought music to my ears.

All in all the Airport Express is a great little piece of kit, but don't even think you are going to have an easy time getting it to work on your network, unless it is the only device providing wireless access, or you own apple base stations. Anyway, I am off to listen to some music in my living room and play with the remote app.