Apple Airport Extreme/Express

[toasty]

OK, my wireless router is becoming increasingly less reliable, and am thinking of moving over to an Apple product as part of my goal to rid my home of PCs. I'm a little confused on a couple of things. First, do both of these function as wireless routers, or just the Extreme?

Also, how does the thing work where I beam music around the house? My current wireless router is on the third floor of my house in the office -- a room I find myself using increasingly less now that I have my MacBook, but that's still where the router needs to go because it's hardwired to the PC, and that's where the cable comes in for the internet. If I put the Extreme up there, could I then buy an Express and connect that to my stereo? If I buy two or three Express stations and attach them to different stereo set-ups, will the same music go to both of them at the same time -- so I could basically pipe music throughout my whole house?

Finally, I have a drive that I use to backup my system via Time Machine. If I attach that drive to one of the Airport Base stations, will it still work as a backup drive?

Thx for any info...

[feather]

Re: Apple Airport Extreme/Express

If I'm not wrong ... you need a wireless router or Airport Extreme. Express only works as a repeater.

You can pipe music wherever your Express is plugged in. iTunes let you select multiple speakers.

You can't just plug a hard drive into Airport Extreme and use it for storage. What you want for that is network storage or NAS. The box comes with I/O ability that you will need to read/write to your hard drive, which the Airport Extreme would be lacking.

Or I could be way wrong

[beanzncheez]

Re: Apple Airport Extreme/Express

NAS

Carry on...

[feather]

Re: Apple Airport Extreme/Express

Oh the cool thing about some NAS is they come with bittorrent clients, so if you're a downloader, you don't need your macbook on, leave the NAS to download 24/7. And when you're out, you can log into the client and control it from any web browsers.

[toasty]

Re: Apple Airport Extreme/Express

OK, I'm an idiot -- NAS?

And what is the difference between network storage and having a hard drive attached to the router. When you attach a drive to the router, does it not become network storage? I'm confused.

[feather]

Re: Apple Airport Extreme/Express

NAS = network attached storage. You can't just attach a hard drive to a router because for you to read/write files to it, you usually need an operating system such as Windows, Dos, Linux, or Mac OS. Read/write operations are the most basic processes in an operating system.

A hard drive is only the physical medium to store and retrieve data. You need something in between to read the data and 'interpret' it for you.

Hmmm rough analogy: Imagine you have a recorder and you recorded someone speaking in a foreign language. The recorder stores it for you, but you still need a translator to help you make sense of it.

[feather]

Re: Apple Airport Extreme/Express

Sorry dude, apparently you CAN attach an external hdd to your Airport Extreme.

[toasty]

Re: Apple Airport Extreme/Express

Sorry dude, apparently you CAN attach an external hdd to your Airport Extreme.

That is bad-ass. Apple store, here I come...

[Jenks]

Re: Apple Airport Extreme/Express

AE is a breeze to set up.

[miketpoto]

Re: Apple Airport Extreme/Express

I use the express as my only router and it works like a charm.

[beanzncheez]

Re: Apple Airport Extreme/Express

It's all a breeze.

[toasty]

Re: Apple Airport Extreme/Express

I use the express as my only router and it works like a charm.

I'd be totally behind this if I didn't need the ethernet ports. As I understand it, the ethernet port on the Express is input only, right?

[miketpoto]

Re: Apple Airport Extreme/Express

I'd be totally behind this if I didn't need the ethernet ports. As I understand it, the ethernet port on the Express is input only, right?

yup.

Get a switch.

[feather]

Re: Apple Airport Extreme/Express

Hmmm does AE + external hdd only work with Time Machine? Can you manually copy files onto the external hdd?

[|Thrax|]

Re: Apple Airport Extreme/Express

I use the express as my only router and it works like a charm.

++ and i stream to it.