[Soundhound]

Over the last two months I bought an Airport Extreme and four Airport Expresses to run music all over the house - they're all 802.11g of course.

Now Apple comes out with the new Airport Express running at 802.11n. I could get that one when it comes out, but all my Expresses will take the speed down to the 802.11g spec right? This kind of sucks. I'd like to have the new Extreme because then I wouldn't need to keep a mac serving up my 500 gigs of music (which I have on a lacie external) because the new Extreme lets you serve up hard disks directly to the network.

This is really frustgtrating. I spoke to Apple at least 10 times over the last months discussing how I was setting up this system, and no one ever said wait till they introduce the new stuff in January.

I wonder when the new Expresses will come out.

[mduell]

Of course they're not going to tell you.

I don't know what you mean by "take the speed down"... of course, the Expresses will continue to function at g speeds, and sharing the n router among multiple clients (computers and expresses) divides the bandwidth up. But with an n client connected to an n router, you're going to see better speeds than a g client connected to a g router.

[Soundhound]

I don[t know much about all this, but what I thought was that if any part of a network operates at a slower speed, then the whole network will operate at that slower speed. So if the Extreme operates at n, but the expresses are all g, the network will always operate at g.

[Soundhound]

I'm very new to this, but for streaming music for the most part the speed of the network now seems ok. The problem I'm having is that I think I'm setting things up in an unorthodox way, and Apple stuff doesn't take kindly to that:

I have an older Powerbook (2001 titanium g4, 400mhz) connected to an Airport extreme. It has a 500 gig lacie hard drive connected to it which is full of music. It serves up music to the wireless network which includes 4 airport expresses connected to stereos in different rooms, and is accessed wirelessly by several powerbooks.

The music streaming works ok. Not perfect, there are occassional dropouts, but on the whole it's very good. The problem is that I use my powerbook to manage the itunes music library on the hard drive, not the powerbook which is connected to the hard drive by firewire and is serving it up. I do this by mounting the hd on my powerbook through a piece of software called Sharepoints (I think). But this has problems - for example syncing my ipod takes a really long time because it's pulling files over the wireless network. Last night I just connected my powerbook directly to the hd and synced my ipod that way.

there's gotta be a better way. I'm wondering if the new airport exteme that was just announced will be it.

P.S. I disagree with 'of course they're not going to tell you'. Apple makes great stuff, but they always screw the people who buy just before the updates. If they helped those people more, they wouldn't just be a company that makes great stuff, they would be a great company that makes great stuff that really looks after they're customers. I guess you can't have everything...