Apple today announced their newest Airport Product, the AirPort Express, which allows 802.11b/g connected computers running iTunes to stream music to their stereo systems wirelessly. In addition, the product can serve as a wireless networking and USB printer sharing device.

Of primary interest to HA members is the iTunes streaming ability, which allows the properly equipped user to connect their stereo to the AirPort Express through either an analog or digital connection (not both) from the units miniplug output and stream music from their computer through the air.

The device also features an integrated firewall and Wi-Fi Protected Access encryption, and costs $129 from Apple.

An additional $39 nets the user a "Monster Cable" connection kit that converts the miniplug output to either a stereo RCA analog output or a TOSlink optical output, and includes an extension power cord.

Well now it's obvious why Apple didn't choose FLAC and created their own lossless codec

For those wondering if AirPort Express supports MP3, AAC, or any other specific file formats, the answer is no. AirPort Express supports Apple's Lossless Compression technology -- and everything that your iTunes streams across the network to Airport Express is compressed using that technology.

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).

If iTunes is playing back a digital multichannel file format like AC3 (Dolby Digital) or DTS, those bitstreams are wrapped in Apple's compression and encryption, and then decoded at the other end. In those cases, AirPort Express would end up streaming the raw AC3 or DTS stream via an optical cable to your home theater receiver for decoding.

http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/editors/archives/000212.php

Seems kind of like a cool idea. Nice that it's so portable. Wonder how long it'll be before someone is able to hack up an fb2k plugin to stream to this thing :B

I've released JustePort, a tool which lets you stream MPEG4 Apple Lossless files to your AirPort Express.