Back to this question-- ITunes and ISY99

[starmanj]

There were old discussion but no solutions yet. Wouldn't it be cool to push a button and play an Itunes playlist? So you can airplay music on-demand to zones in your home? Without fumbling with a phone?

 

I am running Itunes on a dedicated home windows server. Airplay activates on-demand amplifiers to play music in the house. I can play music via my Ipad or android via Itunes controller apps, but want to push an Insteon button or activate music via geofencing.

 

Has anybody done this yet? How?

 

Thanks

Starmanj

[starmanj]

So...a lot of views but no response. I take it that is a big fat "no" it can't be done.

 

I guess we wait for Apple to follow up on its announcement of taking over the smarthome? Wonder how they will compete with the ISY...

 

How about Chromecast? Can the ISY send commands to that to stream music?

 

Music streaming in the Smarthome is kind of a big thing, very surprised ISY can't do anything there.

 

Bueller?

[bleepblorp]

Music streaming in the Smarthome is kind of a big thing, very surprised ISY can't do anything there.

I suspect it depends on what you want the ISY to do. In your original example, it sounds like you want to be able to trigger your Itunes installation to play a playlist (presumably using Airplay) based on ISY detecting an event (button press on a keypad). While ISY won't do this directly the product has long been dedicated to communicating to open interfaces. Airplay doesn't quite fall into this category.

 

With that said, you could achieve what you describe, but you would need to create a network interface for your Itunes server to listen for commands (i.e. some server that would run on your Itunes server). A quick google search for 'control itunes command line' seems promising.

 

As far as streaming in a Smarthome, as I imagine you are well aware there are lots of streaming options in the market today. The difficulty of having ISY talk to each of these varies quite a bit. I would imagine Airplay is going to be on the more involved end of the spectrum. I, for one, am a long time Squeezebox customer (even though it has been discontinued for some time). I was able to use the ISY's network resource option to control all the players in my home without any additional fooling around.

 

Ultimately I guess I responded just to reply that what you want to do can be done, but like a lot of things in home automation the choice of products/interfaces/etc will guide the complexity of the result.

 

Sincerely,

Bertram

[starmanj]

Thanks- yes, I have been googling those search terms for a few years since I bought my ISY. I knew the old squeezebox could do what I wanted, but alas it's no more. I have converted my Chromecast into an audio player with an HDMI-audio converter, but can't figure out how to command it with an URL address line.

 

My dream is to come home, push an Insteon button and play music.

 

My question is has anybody actually done this in real life with current technology??

[johnnyt]

I import my iTunes playlists into my sonos system. If you search this forum for sonos you can find posts on making calls to sonos from ISY.

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[dstanley]

I also use Sonos exclusively in my home. I have figured out enought to control my Sonos the way that I want with the limited 'one-way' communication of the ISY network module.

Out of curiosity I did some googling and it looks like with a Mac and iTunes and some Apache web stuff that you can do what you want to do. Please do not ask me more info about it as I do not know but I think these websites explain exactly what you want to do. That is start iTunes playing or stopping a playlist by sending a URL to your Mac while it is on and running the web server software.

 

This is what I found for iTunes on the MAC:

http://search.cpan.org/~bdfoy/Apache-iTunes-0.11/lib/iTunes.pm

http://www.myths.com/pub/doc/oreilly/other/Mac_OS_X_Hacks/mcosxhks-chp-3-sect-12.html

http://www.markburgess.us/browserTunes/

And this one:

http://www.whatsmyip.org/lib/itunes-web-remote/

 

Some of this seems really old but who knows ... Maybe it is still relevant. Please post back if you try any of these ideas and if anything works for you. I do not have a MAC (yet) but that does not mean I am not interested in the results.

 

If your iTunes is on a PC then maybe something like this would help:

http://www.engadget.com/2005/12/13/how-to-control-itunes-from-any-web-browser/

 

Good luck and HAVE FUN!

 

Dwight