I went and bought myself an Airport Express today. For those who don’t know, airport express is a wireless capable device, with an ethernet port, USB port and a 3.5mm audio jack. You can use it as a wireless access point, you can use it as a wireless network range extender, you can use it as a print server, you can use it as an ethernet to wireless adapter, and you can send audio to it, via iTunes, or a nice 3rd party app called AirFoil. I bought it for it’s audio capabilities. I’ve set up the Airport in my lounge room where a nice Sony stereo resides, plugged it into the wall, hooked up the Audio, and it’s off and running, now I can send my audio from my computer to the stereo, which is awesome, but what if I want to skip a song or choose a song? That’s where Sailing Clicker comes in. Sailing Clicker is an App that lets you control certain functions on your computer, via Bluetooth or WiFi, with your PDA or phone. I’ve got a nice WiFi enabled imate PDA, which I have Sailing Clicker installed on. I can search my music library, view a playlist, pretty much do anything I want, anywhere in the house, and the audio goes through whatever my airport is plugged into. Awesomeness.

It was all pretty painless to set up, and it works just great. You can have multiple Airport expresses scattered throughout the house, and send the Audio to all of them at once, all synced and playing at the same time. Great for parties, it would be good to have a second one of these puppies to plug in outside and hook it up to some portable speakers.

The only issue I have with it at this point is when iTunes is at full volume, the Audio quality is lacking, and you get the odd pop and crackle, which is insanely loud and could damage the speakers, so you have to keep the iTunes volume at around 50% to 70%. Problem is you can adjust the volume just by pushing up on the PDA with sailing clicker, I’m working on disabling that so that no volume adjustment is possible, preventing any scary pops to my housemate’s stereo.

All of the apps and hardware work on both Mac and PC, Cool!