Airport Express & Virgin Media Superhub

Hi Derek,

I am in the exact same situation, just got the ugrade from Virgin this morning. The engineer left the Airport Express connected via an ethernet cable to the Superhub as it had been to the old modem. I found that without changing any settings at all on the Airport Express I was able to have my computer on the network from the Superhub, but still select my hi-fi speakers in iTunes (ie the ones connected over Airtunes via the Airport Express) and play music over the network.

At this point the Superhub and Airport were both creating wifi networks, so I tried connecting to each network in turn an found the Superhub gave me a slightly faster internet connection when testing the speed through a website. Using the Airport utility I then changed the settings on the Airport Express so that instead of creating a network it was set to "Disable wireless and connect to a computer or network via Ethernet" (that's on about the fourth or fifth page of the setup utility.) The AE rebooted with the new settings so my old network was gone, but I was still able to select my hi-fi speakers and play music over Air Tunes while the computer was on the Superhub network.

It looks like if you prefer it is also possible to turn off the wifi on the Superhub, connect the Airport Express to it via Ethernet and continue the use the AE as both your wireless router and for Airtunes, but my first impression s that I'm getting less audio drop outs with the way I've got it set up now than I did with the old modem-AE combination.

Sorry for the slightly long-winded reply, hope you get sorted.

Best,

Chris

Hi Derek,

I've got he AE connected to the Superhub with a network cable, but you can also use the Airport utility to configure the Airport express to join a wireless network. I haven't tried it but I assume if you select that option it will ask you for the network name and password that's on the Virgin router.

You should then be able to select your hi-fi speakers ove the network as before.

Cheers,

Chris

Hi Derek,

I don't really use Spotify so I'm not sure if there's a simple way to send audio to the AE from within the application, but I use this third party app that lets you stream audio from any application over your wifi network:

http://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/

There's also a discussion about it here:

http://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Mac/Airplay-Stream-to-an-Airport-Device/ td-p/877

which mentions a couple of other solutions and also suggests that the next OS X update will include airplay for all applications, so it may not be something you want to shell out $25 for right now, which is what airfoil costs.

Lastly I found this article about it:

http://www.simpleeditions.com/8001/how-to-stream-spotify-wirelessly-to-your-ster eo

but again their method using the airport express also requires airfoil, so if you had it working before it must have been a different way.

Hope you get sorted.

Chris

Does anyone know how to reinstall AE to achieve the above, or how to ""Disable wireless and connect to a computer or network via Ethernet" after the product is installed?

Thanks. I managed to fix this through wireless tab in the edit screen, cunningly hidden within the airport utility window. This enables the user to combine with an existing wireless network rather than run airport express as a separate network. May have been more obvious to more seasoned users!