Please allow me to have another geek moment, if you will.  This time it’s about music at the reception.

Music is a great part of my life having learned several instruments, composing over the past 10 years and it has been something that has helped to unite Scott and me right from the very beginning.

I have been spending some time figuring out the music for the reception and while I have all of the actual music figured out, I am now trying to figure out how to network the music for the reception.

What I currently have is :

• an old Apple Airport Extreme router
• my MacBook Pro hooked in directly to the router via CAT5
• two iHome speakers (iW1 and iW2)
• one iPhone to remotely control both speakers and music

The plan is to stream up to 4 hours of music using AirPlay – The reception is really only 2.5 hours but you never know how we may need to change music on the fly.

I’ve had some really good experiences routing the music from our laptops and Mac Mini to our Apple TVs in the condo, but I’ve had some challenges with these speakers cutting out when we had a party a few weeks ago.

I figured it was because we simply had too much data being pumped through the old Airport Extreme which, while it’s dual band, is not dual band simultaneously.  Everything in our condo is wireless which can really tax a network. We’ve since upgraded in the condo with a new Airport Extreme and and Airport Express for deadspots towards the bedrooms.  I figure, creating a dedicated network would address these dropouts.

Nope!

The iW1, despite being a better sounding speaker, seems to be contributing to the network troubles.  It’s constantly cutting out especially when playing with the second speaker on WiFi.  Running a port scan or connecting to this speaker through a web browser completely garbles up the connection.  The iW2 doesn’t have this issue.

Testing the iW2 by itself, it seems to play continuously, no problems with panning and scanning music while testing fades and such.  I can throw almost anything at that speaker and it takes it.

Thankfully, the iW2 has an ethernet port, sadly the iW1 does not.  So my solution is to wire up the more reliable speaker and hopefully the iW1 behaves on our day.  And having played a few tracks, this setup seems stable.

My approach to DJing this wedding, and it’s a tactic I’ve used before when DJing casual events, is to pretty much setup a long play list to play through and let iTunes do it’s magic fading in and out.  It’s neat sitting back and watching the music do it’s job to bring up and slow down the crowd.

Having the iPhone on the network is going to be a neat addition to this DJ experience.  I can be anywhere in the crowd, adjust volume on any speaker, and change any attribute of the playlist including changing the ordering of songs.

Yes, I fully admit to being a control freak on what music is played at the wedding after seeing the experiences of some other weddings.  That said, I have to admit, I do wish that Apple had kept the music request feature in their remote app.

Enough geekery – about the music?  Expect everything from the 80s to current with several genres but mostly EDM, Dance, Pop and a lot of British music.  If you want to let your inner diva out, go for it. There will be something for everyone in this playlist.

I promise that after the wedding, I’ll post our choices for each part of the ceremony and the full reception play list I planned.