Upstairs, I've got my computer. Downstairs, I've got matthew_k's ReplayTV, which needs to get onto my network, and a home stereo, which might as well get music from my computer.

The "obvious" solution to all this would be an Apple Airport Express to bridge the network, and deliver tunes. I spent half of last night fighting with the damn thing to get it configured properly. Turns out, you need WDS (wireless distribution system) configured when all you want to do is create a wireless bridge. This nightmare turned out to require downloading the latest firmware for my D-Link DGL-4300, but I've finally got everything working. Probably the biggest annoyance is that all the web pages out there are inconsistent about how, exactly, you're supposed to type your WEP key into the Apple dialog box. There's some consensus that you need to prefix the hex digits with a dollar sign ($), but this caused the dialog for me to switch from 128-bit WEP to 40-bit WEP. That's clearly annoying, but it's not like WEP offers much in the way of meaningful security, anyway.

My next adventure is sorting out some kind of remote access to the tunes. I thought about setting up VNC, but that really falls down on "it just works" usability. Instead, I'm looking at two different pieces of cheap shareware: CoverBuddy and WebRemote. It annoys me somewhat to be paying for something that Apple should be providing as part of the package.

CoverBuddy pretty much works as advertised, but the interface is pretty painful. There's no search of any kind. They're really shooting for an icon-only interface that might run on a PSP web client. WebRemote is a little better, providing a lot of text, but still no search gizmo and it looks like you have to click on each song to make it play -- no way to queue up and entire album at once.

Am I missing something? Do I have to do VNC to have decent functionality?