Is there a maximum number of AirPlay receivers that I can output to at the same time?
If I buy 6 different Airport Express' to have one in each room will they all work together or is there a maximum number of receivers you can use at once? For example if I want to choose between the six rooms or play the music in all the rooms at once will that work?
The maximum number of Airplay receivers are 3 to 6 as noted in iTunes: About playing music with AirPlay
The maximum number of outputs are three to six in typical conditions. The number that works for you will depend on your environmental conditions (such as building composition and local radio interference), distance to the outputs, and available network capacity relative to your other usage.
In answer to your points here is what I have found when installing my system:
14 zone system (14 apple TVs; 14 Airplay receiver amps; Quad-core 8 GB RAM Dell PowerEdge Rack mount server (4 TeraBytes); 1 Mac server with homeshare; 1GB 24 port switch; 1GB 4 port router; 2 x 1GB wireless access points).
So far I have had no issues with the receiver limit (6 zones set up so far). Make sure your Apple TV's are directly linked to your switch using CAT6 so that they do not take up wireless Bandwidth. Use the wireless for your IOS devices.
A point to note is that even though you may be running a 1GB network, the Apple TVs and your Airplay amplifiers are 10/100.
The homeshare 5 machine limit is a non-issue as the Airplay receivers are IOS devices. Homeshare applies to mac devices and is only an Apple method of serving out the media you have stored on Itunes on different machines. 5 machines is more than adequate (or simply consolidate it on a single server using Air Video and Handbrake (make sure the copyright laws in your country allow you to do so :-) ). I have both mac homeshare server and my main Dell server is running the Air Video Server with Air Video clients on my Ipads and Iphones.
There is no need for commercial solutions which cost a fortune (NOT that this is working out cheap...it is all relative). This solution is costing no-more than a Sonos Home system, which only lets you stream audio to different rooms. The difference is that with Sonos you can control each room from the same controller, with this system you need one IOS devices for every room you want to play different media in. NOT a big deal as the up side is that you can also stream video and also mirror your IOS device screen i.e play satellite TV e.g Skygo or Skype to your TV screen and also view all your photo albums.
Good Luck! Harp Grewal
I currently have 5 units working on airplay. There is no delay on sound between rooms. I have:
- 3 older airport Express
- 1 new 2nd Gen
- 1 apple TV
The only thing I had to do was upgrade the Network card in the PC to 10/100/1000 and buy a gigabit switch. Although the units themselves are only 10/100 the PC will not run them all with a 10/100 card. It drops out constantly and looses sync.
Since installing the new card and new switch, all at a cost of about £30 it works perfectly. I can also set 2 of the units to be wireless access points and still get a decent speed while listening to music.
My son is on xbox (wired) and the TV streaming netflix.
It just seems very stable, suprisingly so!