Hi All (esp. Ron),
I’ve found a kind-of solution to my problem. Although not too relevant to firefly, I thought i’d share it with you all. First, i’ll re-clarify what I ultimately wanted to achieve; Using iTunes as a Remote Control for my Roku M1000 Soundbridge:
After a LOT of trial and error of various products I finally found NCH Swiftsound’s ‘BroadWave’ product (http://www.nch.com.au/streaming/index.html).
Basically, it creates an M3U playlist from any audio output on the PC. One such output is ‘Stereo Mix’ which is effectively what you hear through your {computer} speakers.
So my setup now is as follows:
Firefly (of course) on PC upstairs.
Laptop downstairs (or anywhere) running iTunes and Broadwave.
Roku with Internet Station pointing to the IP:Port of BroadWave on my laptop (http://192.168.0.6:85/broadwave.m3u)
My Music resides upstairs on my computer with Firefly ‘excellently’ serving my music collection.
My Laptop has iTunes installed and through it is connected to the Firefly Server.
As I play a song in iTunes, BroadWave outputs that to an M3U playlist as listed above.
My Roku picks up this stream and effectively therefore plays the output of my Laptop’s iTunes.
It’s not a perfect solution for many reasons, some of which have been listed above. First of all there is latency. When I play a song in iTunes, the song reaches 3 seconds of play-time before it plays on the Roku. This isn’t an issue for me as my laptop is muted anyway so I don’t hear a horrible ghosting of mis-timed sounds.
Secondly, by using BroadWave, not only am I adding another level of audio conversion, but my bitrate is reduced to a maximum of 256k. Ok, so for me, that’s not a great issue as most of my stuff is at 192k, but the fact is, sound fidelity is being lost.
However, all in all, it’s a solution of sorts. I can use the Roku to talk directly to Firefly and browse my playlist through the Roku remote control and display when I want the maximum audio fidelity. AND I can now also use iTunes as a remote which is a much easier way to find a song out of 30’000 especially when you’re drunk with a load of mates and you can only remember a small part of the song name etc. ;o)
I hope that helps someone else.
I think Firefly is great at the moment and am happily using it, but if there was a way to browse and play tunes through a web gui on the Roku or via Firefly direclty, that would be even better ;o))
Great product though, great forum, and great people. Thanks to all who responded to, and/or have read, my posts.
Andy