A work in progress.

Download Apple’s free Remote app to your iDevice and you get a handy interface for managing your remote music server. I explained how I set up one of these in yesterday’s column.

Start the app on, say, the iPad and this is what you see:

The list of sources appears in the left hand column and the contents in the right. This is the ‘Artists’ view – chosen from the tabs at the base of the screen.

Switch to Albums and you get this – as you can see I still have some work to do to get cover art for all my albums:

And so on. Touching the four arrows at lower right switches you to a blank screen which acts as a touch pad, permitting remote control of menu selections for the AppleTV on the screen of your television. Nice, and a lot more reliable than using a mouse on the sofa cushion!

Touch the ‘AppleTV’ bar in the left hand column and you see your sources on one screen:

The ‘iMac music server’ is the old G4 iMac I set up yesterday to act as a source for all our recorded music.

What is missing, and why I captioned this piece ‘a work in progress’ is AirPlay functionality. You cannot select where to output sound, so when I want to do so, I have go to the iMac music server and do so in the iTunes application there, as I illustrated yesterday. Not a big deal and maybe a constraint placed on Apple by the modest processing power and RAM of the current iPad. Given that each of my three speaker options has its own volume control – TV, Office and Dining Room – I can change or mute any of these when needed. Still, it would be nice to be able to do this from the iPad whose control is limited to pause/fast forward/rewind and play.

The Remote app is nicely engineered, the price is right (as in ‘free’!) and you can download it from the AppStore.