Airport express and NAS on wireless network
 

Daft question:

I currently have an airport express and a wireless router (Netgear) - my laptops (one vista, one XP) can only connect to one, not both. i.e. to play music to the airport express I need to disconnect from the router and connect to the airport express.

Is it possible to connect to the airport express via the router? I could then have a NAS also connected to the router such that either laptop (and main PC) can all access the same music and play out without faffing around with different connections.

We have a lot of music and find the laptop ideal when people are round for searching / messing with playlists etc. It's also nice to have the cover art on display. The limiting factor at the minute is that we have to link the laptop to an external hard drive to access the music, which impedes the portability somewhat.

Thoughts?

Thanks in advance

Gordo

Hi Gordo,
Have a read of this Apple Support Document. It details how to setup the Express in "client mode" and from what I've been reading, this allows it to join an existing wireless network and the AirTunes side of things still works, which is what you want. Note that in this mode the ethernet connection won't work, so if you have anything hanging off it's ethernet port, they will not get any network activity.

If your main wireless router supports WDS, have a look at the list here then you should be able to reconfigure the Airport Express to be an extension/repeater of your existing wireless network, and thus you'd connection your machines to the main wirless network and by virtue of WDS they would still be able to access the network via the Express and thus AirTunes would still work, and anything hanging off the ethernet port on the express would work.

I've got my wireless network configured like this. My Office is upstairs and is where my ADSL comes in, I've got an Airport Extreme which is set to provide DHCP, and the WDS is enabled. My airport express is downstairs in the sitting room, and it's connected to my AV amp and my xbox is connected to the ethernet port. This allows me to use LIVE, plus, as the box is chipped, and I run XBMC, I can access the music stored on my iMac upstairs, or stream content from the network/internet.

Thx Markus - sounds like exactly what I need - I'll have a play over the weekend and see if I can get it to behave - following which it feels like a NAS is next on my list!

Gordo

I used an airport express and Netgear router. The AE was an 'extension' of the wireless network and worked just fine.

I purchased an express at the airport - funny that - on Monday, loving it so far, can't wait to get it home and hooked up with my Time Capsule... which by the way is showing up nicely in Finder via Mobile Me right now.