February 26, 2007

Winamp Airport Express Plugin

We love the Airport Express here and we have been using it for quite some time. The thing we have always wished has been for other programs to use its ability to stream digital quality music to your stereo via this great little device. Well along comes our favorite audio player from years past, Winamp. Winamp has been around since...well just about the beginning of digital audio on computers. One of the features that has set Winamp apart from the field is that since their inception they have encouraged 3rd party plug-ins for their software. Over the years countless great plug-ins have been released upon the world. Well recently we found a plug-in for Winamp that allows it to utilize the connection that the Airport makes between your computer and your stereo.

So our thoughts on this ability are mixed. At first we were very excited that someone had opened the ability of the Airport and unlocked it from iTunes. The download and installation is about as simple and straightforward as it gets. The plug-in incorporated perfectly into the Winamp menu system to feel like it was always there. Once we restarted the program we saw a new menu item, Remote Speakers!
Selecting that options brings up a sub-menu with all of your Airport speakers that are connected to your network. In our case we only have one so we selected that. We then hit the play button on Winamp and what did we hear, but sweet sweet music coming from our stereo. We were overjoyed. We have loved Winamp for years and the prospect of going back to it for streaming music was almost too good to be true. Well it was :)
When we wanted to switch back to playing music over our computer we couldn't figure out any way to turn it off. After searching the web and looking at just about every option of Winamp our only choice was to uninstall the plug-in.
So while the thought of using one of our favorite Windows programs to stream music to our stereo made us dance with joy, the fact that it seems that we are locked into using the remote speakers was a deal breaker for us.
Hey, maybe we are just to dense to figure out how to turn it off. Maybe one of you can leave a comment and let us know that we are morons and there is a big fat off button somewhere :)
But all in all it is a great first step. We look forward to future releases of this plug-in.

Check it out here