Comment: AirTunes is a neat idea... but functionally useless in the more-crowded cities of the east coast. (Way too much interference. When there's nothing playing you get phone conversations. When there is something playing, you get random static, wild volume variations, and interruptions by other signals.) It's a neat idea, but... there are certain places where I'll stick with (shielded!) cables.

Question: do you actually find mt-daapd to be functionally useful? I found that it craps out (meaning, sends 0-byte streams for some tracks, fails to even present others) around 5000 tracks. I mean, really:

% sudo find /media/music -name \*.mp3 | wc -l
   19933

What are you talking about?

a) AirTunes is a digital signal... you're not going to get static. You'll get a signal or no signal, or it cutting in and out. But not static or phone conversations. Surely you're talking about something totally unrelated.

b) I'm using it over GigE, not wireless anyway.

And no, no problems with mt-daapd. I also have a lot of music.

a) Talking about friends' experience in Brooklyn (which led me NOT to buy one for Phily), and it's the connection between iTunes on a laptop and the AirTunes whence the interference. (I suppose the phone conversations are probably crappy shielding on their stereo equipment, now that you mention it.)

b) With what number of tracks indexed at what depth? Perhaps it's gotten a bit better... but I found it unusable with half that quantity (not very long ago in time; I was still pulling things back off CD-R to the disk array from a backup of a couple of non-redundant drives that failed).

I guess I was also unaware that AirTunes could be fed from an "iTunes" share presented on the wired side, though it only stands to reason.

this one uses a digital signal
& i love it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Sound_System_80

do you even know what a digital signal is?

I'm not sure who you're addressing, and it's a pretty vague term even with context (the several TCP sockets on which this response will be sent to you qualify as "digital signals"), but I believe that I understood brad's meaning and it doesn't change real-world (bad) experience with one of these base stations and interefence in music coming only through it, not from various other inputs attached to the same stereo system.

It's also possible I'm hideously out of date, but google shoves me at firefly these days, which doesn't do much for version checking...

% pkg_info | grep mt-daapd
mt-daapd-0.2.4_1    Multithread daapd yet another Server for Apple iTunes

That does appear to still be the current version in FreeBSD's (where my disk array and, thus, music live) ports...

> I seem to recall I positioned left & right for the sitter, not the stander, figuring the sitter is going to be there longer and would more appreciate the stereo not being backwards.

Doesn't really matter- as when you'd want the best fidelity in the bathroom there's likely both a sitter AND a stander.

How about a switch on the seat to swap the channels depending on the orientation?

... too much?

That's exactly how I'd have optimized it too. :-)