Casa means “home” or “house” in Spanish and Italian. So a casa full of tunes — or housewide audio — is a pretty sweet thing. Of course, housewide audio is nothing new, but accomplishing it in the past has meant a rack full of sources, amplifiers, and control gear, with wiring spider-webbed out to various rooms, control pads, and speakers.
But then Apple came along and flipped this mind-think upside down with its AirPlay wireless streaming capability. Now a house full of music can be achieved by spreading AirPlay-enabled devices and speakers around and streaming tunes to them.
What if you wanted to combine the traditional world of wired audio distribution and wireless AirPlay streaming? Take the music you own or choose to pull out of the cloud via services like iCloud, Spotify, and last.fm, and control it all via a convenient iOS, Android or PC interface? What you’d come up with would probably be a lot like CasaTunes Air.
CasaTunes sent me its XLi music server with CasaTunes Air, a flexible, hybrid design that supports both wired and wireless AirPlay music zones while offering some very cool multiroom features to boot. The server includes a 1-terabyte hard drive, handles numerous online streaming music services, and can supply five streams simultaneously to 6 hard-wired and 10 AirPlay wireless zones. My question: Is CasaTunes’ XLi ready for prime time, or is it full of hot air?
I purchased the CasaTunes XLi card and software in 2012 and built a PC specifically for it, and have been using it daily since. There are some real usability issues that Mr Sciacca didn't mention.
If you have a large library, browsing by list is not an efficient way to reach your music, and the CasaTunes (CT) Search function is deeply flawed.
Searching on ‘de la soul’ finds any artist/song/album with the letters 'd-e' OR ‘l-a’ OR ‘s-o-u-l’ in them. Quotation marks, brackets, and boolean operators (AND, NOT, -) have no effect.
Adding tracks on CT requires the user to trigger a full rescan, which slows the software, takes about 45 minutes (for my +/-90k tracks), and requires Windows Media Player or iTunes to be running on the server to provide the database.
Rebooting the hardware also requires a full rescan before any functions are available and you’ll know when it’s done scanning, because even if all rooms were off before the reboot, some may come back on.
The output from the XLi card controls volume in the various zones, which can be a problem with auto sensing amplifiers like the Niles SI-1230, because you’ll need to turn the volume up past 50% just to signal the amp, then down, which might shut off again.
The iOS and Android apps are notably different, which means I can adjust the room volume with the rocker on my Android while my wife needs to swipe the screen on her iPhone. She gets a slide show, but I can set the sleep timer, initial volume, balance, and tone.
Follow up on my comment:
On 3/11/13 CasaTunes updated the core software and addressed the search and library refresh issues, Giving both much faster and more user-friendly functionality.
The other annoyances remain, but there is hope for improvement in the near future.