A week ago I decided that it was a little too quiet in the living room. We’ve been living in The Asia House now for over a year and a half without music on the ground floor, and the ceiling-mounted speakers weren’t doing much good just sitting there. Those of you who followed the construction of the house might recall that I had ceiling speakers installed in several locations in the house, with the speaker cables terminated in a hub in the basement. My problem now was how to best pipe music into the living room speakers, with proper remote control, in a cost-effective fashion.

I decided to experiment a little. First I hooked up a simple stereo amplifier in the basement and connected it to the 8-ohm speaker pair. Then I hooked up to the LAN a low-cost HP Netbook that I had recently received as a gift. I configured the Netbook to run iTunes (and not much else). With the speaker output plugged into the amplifier I could now play any sound off the Netbook through the living room speakers. But how to handle the remote control?

To the rescue came Apple’s great Remote app which I downloaded for free on their Appstore. As I have mentioned in a previous post, we have a couple of iPod Touch units which I want to use as remote controls for The Asia House’s systems. This was a perfect opportunity.

First I had to download (for $4.95 on the Appstore) an upgrade to the iPod Touch operating system. After that the Remote app easily synchronized with the copy of iTunes running on the Netbook in the basement using a secure pairing function. It took a little more work to add the links to over 2,500 internet radio stations that came with iTunes, but by adding one playlist for each genre and dragging-and-dropping the radio station titles into the appropriate playlists, I am now able to also select radio stations to play in the living room.

The next thing, of course, is to figure out how to connect the other speakers in the house in a similar fashion, without having to add too many PC’s. I have a couple of ideas on how to do that; now if I could only find enough time to do it in…