Saturday, March 28, 2009

I really love Macs . . .

Today, my wife was involved in putting on a brunch celebrating her hostesses from our jewelry business with eight other jewelers. Not suprisingly, friday evening at 9:45 pm I find myself with the responsibility of working the sound and music. Why is it that nearly every place that these things are put on have a really crappy pa system with the mixer in the FRONT of the room?

Immediately I decide if I am going to do this, I'm gonna do it MY way.

It involved a Mac Mini, a netbook, screensharing, and a wifi router.

I placed the Mac Mini up front running headless, With a 1/8" to rca adapter plugged into the Radioshack PA Amp.

I used the wifi router (running dd-wrt) to provide a wireless connection since my Mini doesn't have an airport card.

I used my MSi Wind Netbook at the back running screen sharing to the headless Mini.

I created a playlist containing the music I wanted in itunes on the wind, and shared it. Then simply played the shared itunes library on the mini in a repeating shuffle. A cool thing is as I added music to the playlist on the wind, it automagically played it on the Mini.

Here's the cool part. This took me less than 45 minutes to get working. From the very first thought if the idea, to a working operation. Try that with a PC!

The Mac Mini and Router:


The MSi Wind:


Screen Sharing:

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