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[nwboater]

My Brother In Law is wanting some kind of Wifi box to enable sending music from his PC to an old stereo Receiver with Analog inputs only. A friend of his suggested an Airport Express.

The  price looks good on it but after reading some threads here it appears a few people have had difficulties getting them to work. Are there other similar devices available that work similarly and would be easy for him to set up? He is not very techie.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Cheers,
Rod

[JimH]

The type of device he would need is called a DLNA Renderer.  Our wiki has a  topic on DLNA.

[nwboater]

Thanks for your response Jim, especially on Christmas Day.MP3s

I have now Googled DLNA Renderer and Searched here without much luck. He is just looking for a simple to setup box and great audio is not a requirement. He will be mostly playing MP3s and just needs something easy and reliable. I'm wondering if it exists!

Seems at one time there was an ID but it is no longer available. Also seems that there have been a lot of difficulties with the Airport Express.

He is not one to do something experimental and he lives too far away for me to easily help him.

Is there anyone here that has had success with such a device, Airport Express or other?

Thanks!

Merry Christmas,
Rod

[csimon]

Standalone audio-only renderers are very rare, but actually any DLNA streamer that can operate in push mode will work, e.g. WDTV Live. It needs a TV or monitor connected to set it up initially but after that you can run it headless like an Airport Express and it will appear as a zone in MC which you can send music to.

An Airport Express only operates as an Airplay receiver so to get it to work with MC you would need some sort of intermediate software to capture MC's output and relay it via Airplay - it's this that is the problem I think with no official and supported software to do this.

[nwboater]

csimon - Thanks very much for your thoughts on this issue. I have left my Brother-In_Laws place and he is not at all techie. I can't try assisting him remotely since he is really only happy with basically a plug and play solution.

On a side note, we just left another friends place after a few days there. She needed a new DVD player so I found a Panasonic BlueRay Player on sale at Best Buy. Absolutely incredible all the stuff it can do with Wi-Fi networking, besides playing all those different shiny discs! Just amazing what $70 will buy you these days. And I was also quite impressed with the up-scaled picture quality on old DVD's.

Cheers,
Rod

[glynor]

Panasonic's software quality is dismal.  Expect it to bork up and fail to see the network anymore regularly.

They make nice hardware.
VieraCast is a POS though.

[nwboater]

Panasonic's software quality is dismal.  Expect it to bork up and fail to see the network anymore regularly.

They make nice hardware.
VieraCast is a POS though.

Interesting about their sw quality. Hopefully wont be a problem for her though since she is only using it as a disc player. I was just boggled though at what these modern players do - not just Panasonic, but Sony and others.

She also has a new ROKU3. It is really great for non techie people that don't want, or need an HTPC. Actually I've been trying to figure a way to integrate it with our HTPC/Plasma TV for Netflix, HULU, etc and use MC for audio. Trouble is it's HDMI so don't know how to split off the audio.

Our 83 year old Great Grandmother Friend is a pretty cool old gal. She uses an Iphone, Ipad, MacBookPro and Kindle besides her ROKU3. Oh yeah, also she is also going through a divorce!

Cheers,
Rod