iPod Beige G3 and Airtunes, home music server?

[GimmeSlack12]

Ok, so the idea came up to setup a wireless music server in my parents house. The first thought was to buy a Mac Mini for this. But I figured that we give the old G3/300 a shot at it before spending $$$ on a machine that would really only have one duty.

Does Airtunes do music justice? I know the G3 will run Tiger (barely). Or at least Panther, cause I'm not sure how much RAM the machine still has.

What y'all think about that setup? Who has an Airtunes setup for their home stereo?

 

[Johnny Rico]

Throw a pci 802.11g card in there and you should be ok. I've experienced occasional problems with pauses in the music under 802.11b, so its a personal preference, both work. The sound quality is fine as long as the music that you're streaming was encoded at a decent bitrate (for mp3s and the like; anything you can play in itunes will work over airtunes).
As far as deciding between panther or tiger to put on the G3, both will run slowly (I really hope you have more than 256mb ram), but I've found each successive edition of OS X to be faster than the previous incarnation so you're likely to have better luck with tiger as long as you don't use the dashboard much. But you're right, either os will be slow.
The only other problem that I forsee is that you're doing this with a desktop machine and airtunes makes more sense with a portable controller (computer) such as a laptop, for the sake of convenience. Its easier to control your airtunes in the living room with a laptop than with the imac in the bedroom. If you're going to be using the G3 computer in a different room to control your stereo it's easier to just plug an ipod in to the stereo and not mess with airtunes.

$.02

 

[croshtique]

If 802.11b is too slow, you could probably 'cheat' by running an Ethernet cable from the G3 to an Airport Express base station. I've got a similar setup between my iBook and a G3 iMac and it works great.

 

[GimmeSlack12]

Hmm, I just need to dig out a monitor that will work now. I'm sure I have one of those VGA to Mac converters here somewhere.
And a HD upgrade, I'm afraid that damn thing only has 2 gb. Ouch!

 

[velocityg4]

I ran a Beige G3 333mhz as an iTunes server and it worked well for that purpose. I could play music through iTunes on the stereo hooked up to the G3 while three other macs connected to the server for playing music in different rooms. So I would imagine that a G3 300mhz should run airtunes fine. As for the which version of OS X. You can only go up to 10.2 on a Beige G3. After that lawsuit against Apple from some beige owners. They mysteriously dropped support for beige G3's in future versions of OS X. Strange considering you could put OS X on a 233mhz imac but not a 333mhz PowerMac.