In short: I've got the music library on the Mac upstairs. I want to play the music in the home theater downstairs. Most of the music is in Apple Lossless format.

I tried routing the music through my Tivo. Turns out to work great for MP3s, but Tivo doesn't support Apple Lossless.

I found a thing called AudioFaucet that seemed like an elegant solution to the problem. It's a Tivo HMO service that hooks into your iTunes database and can directly decode MP3s or can route other content types through AirTunes. Since I've got an Apple Airport Express already, that seemed ideal. It kinda worked, but the AudioFaucet app has a habit of blowing up. It's not stable yet.

Next attempt: maybe I can use a laptop downstairs, via wireless, to grab tunes via iTunes Sharing and spew them back over the wireless to the Airport Express. This turns out to work perfectly for MP3s and even the handful of protected AAC files that I've got. However, no love for Apple Lossless. Nothing happens when you try to play one. (Everything is running the latest iTunes version 7.6.) Google searching turned up a year-old post that describes the same problem. No solution.

I'm toying with buying an Apple TV, since that might work, but it might also suffer the same problem I'm experiencing with iTunes. I could also do regular file system sharing but that's radically slower; I don't want to have to wait for the whole library to be scanned by the laptop before it can start playing.

VNC and such is probably not a winning idea. I'd either want a dedicated client that has all the fancy searching features of iTunes (kinda like iTunes already does for network shares...), or maybe a web thing that would work anywhere. That pretty much knocks out netTunes, but it might still allow for Signal or Sailing Clicker.

So... anybody have any other ideas for what I should try next? Anybody with an Apple TV care to try it with Apple Lossless audio?