Sorry... I use Airfoil myself, but you are right, it isn't the smoothest experience. I read the article about making the APX (Airport Express) a DLNA device, but I believe that the critical bit of software (Air uPNP) from dbPowerAmp is not even supported by dbPowerAmp. It has been a while since I've played with this.
Do you have any other DLNA devices that can see the APX when Air uPNP is operating--other devices than MC15/16?
As far as I know, it seems the options right now are:
- Use Airfoil straight up: it will hijack the 1st MC zone; and limits you to using DirectSound for audio output (eg. no ASIO or WSAPI). I believe adding additional zones will work as long as they are 'local' to your HTPC--Airfoil won't hijack anything other than the 1st zone.
- Go the old-fashioned route with wires and dedicated amps for each zone.
- Switch to an actual DLNA device for your remote zones.
I too would like my APX and/or Airfoil to work better. Airfoil crashes at the drop of a hat whenever multi-channel files are played and also whenever I play a video file too. I frequently forget to quit Airfoil when playing different files, and sometimes that causes me to lose all sound output. It's hard to lay any blame on JRiver--Rogue Amoeba is doing some pretty low-level stuff to hijack the audio stream. Perhaps now that Apple has opened the standard to transmit to other hardware devices, JRiver could investigate implementing the protocol directly...
brad