Apr 27 2009
mini Radio Station
With your mini and iPod, no doubt the bulk of your music collection lives in iTunes. Set your music free and enjoy it throughout your house the old fashioned way using your stereos’ FM receiver. For a few more dollars, add a wireless remote that will work walls away from your Mac.
What you’ll need:
- Mac mini or Mac with USB port
- RocketFM FM transmitter from Griffin Technology (Amazon: $32)
- Optional: RF Remote for your Mac, like Griffin’s AirClick (Amazon: $28) or the five grenade reviewed RF Remote for Front Row (Amazon: $31) from Keyspan
- Optional: TuneConnect freeware for controlling iTunes from another Mac and iTaf for scheduling iTunes
The first and most important piece to get in place is the transmitter. Griffin nailed it with the RocketFM. Like your iPod car transmitter, this USB audio device will transmit your Mac’s audio 30 feet through walls and floors. Your placement of the small and memorizingly-lit device will contribute a lot to the signal strength, as will the quality of your receiver. With a decent receiver, a centrally located RocketFM should broadcast throughout your average multi-story 2,500 square foot home.
Set-up is a breeze. The software – a preference pane – isn’t even required for the unit to function, but allows you to switch the frequency to find a nice quiet spot on your dial. Unlike WiFi, additional receivers will not decrease the broadcast range. The zero latency of FM will have every radio in your house playing in sync.
The RocketFM is a great way to get music, podcasts and internet radio into your stereo. It worked flawlessly in my testing. But the transmitter is just the beginning. With an RF remote you can control iTunes from anywhere your radio can get the signal. So not only can you have your music playing all over the house, you can control it from wherever you are.
The last piece is to control iTunes on you mini from your PowerBook or desktop Mac. With freeware like TuneConnect you can search tracks, play pause and skip from another Mac on the network. Rather have the Mac control itself? Then iTaf (requires Tiger) will allow you to schedule your music and even start your mini.
Forget the tangles of speaker wire and the high cost of WiFi audio and turn your Mac into a mini radio station. Long live FM!
For $19.95, equinux’s CoverScout will scour the interwebs for cover art your music was intended to have. It searches international Amazon image catalogs, Google images and, if that doesn’t turn up your missing cover art, it even allows you to use your iSight camera to grab the cover art off the CD you ripped the songs from in the first place. (You did get that music from a legally purchased CD, didn’t you?)
Tangerine from Potion Factory ($24.95) analyzes your iTunes music library and determines the number of beats per minute for each song. Adding this information to your music files allows you to make smarter Smart Playlists that filter music based on the tempo of the songs.
With DockArt, iTunes gains the ability to display album art in the dock and as your desktop picture (though, I’ve found that this bogs down your machine) and also shows a numerical indicator in iTunes’ dock icon showing how many unheard podcasts you currently have on file. DockArt is donationware. In this case, donations are to be sent to the 
On one of my ealier visits to The Lab, a caller asked if there was some way to schedule iTunes to start-up in the middle of the night to download his podcast subscriptions. At the time, we recommended that he set up an event in iCal to launch iTunes every night at a certain time. The part we couldn’t help the caller with at the time was how to get iTunes to shut down again after it was done.