iPod touch remote for iTunes

Monday, January 19. 2009

I have a new toy. Last week I bought an iPod touch. My primary use case is remote controlling media in my home. I already have a HTPC in my living room with access to satellite TV, videos, photos and music. However, I always found it stupid to switch on my TV in order to choose music. I checked choices like Squeezebox Duet or the TEAC WAP-4500. Pretty nice toys starting around 250 EURO. But if you already have a PC, the iPod is about 200+ EURO extra. And it's a nice gadget too. So I ordered one and tried to run the free Remote app from Apple.


My initial attempts were unsuccessful. I was not able to get a connection to my iTunes. It started promising: iTunes showed my device and asked for the PIN (in order to accept remote control commands). But then the iPod tried forever to connect without success.

The first suspicius element was the Vista firewall. But tweaking around did not change it. The other I tried an ad hoc WLAN connection to iTunes running on my laptop. And to my surprise it worked instantly. What was different? The router is in the middle. So I checked the enhanced network settings and unchecked various optimizations. My router is a D-LINK DIR-300 and the settings I changed were:

  • Multicast-Datenströme aktivieren (sorry in german)
  • Wireless enhance mode
  • 802.11g-mode only

I switched them all off (there were on initially) and it worked perfect. The remote works very nice. It behaves like the local music app.

But now the next problem pops up: lousy tagged mp3 files! This is my newest hobby. Getting all the compilations together, such that they appear right on my iPod. Maybe a topic for my next entry.


Posted by Klaus Baumecker Filed under Fun, How Tos.
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Comments


    #1 BuckyBalls on 05/19/09 at 02:06 PM [Reply]
    *Hey Klaus- that's a *great* idea to use your iPod Touch as a remote control. I'm going to go find that app-- thanks for informing me!
    #2 Terence on 02/08/10 at 10:57 AM [Reply]
    *OMG! Thank you so so so so so so so much!! I nearly pulled all my hairs off everytime i tried to make the app work.

    for the past 2 weeks, it didnt came to my mind to google the 2 terms together

    "itunes remote dir-300"

    and today I did, tada, 1st search result was u and u solved my problem! Thanks mate!!
    #2.1 klaus on 02/08/10 at 11:19 AM [Reply]
    *Terence,

    I'm glad helping you.

    klaus.
    #3 Ignacio on 10/24/10 at 05:03 AM [Reply]
    *Thanks I been trying to fix this issue for at least two mounts. I did everything you did. But I never realize about those buttons. Now I can finalize use my iPad to control my home theather...

    Thank you have helped me more than what I can express with my poor english ;-)
    #4 Mark on 11/26/10 at 02:24 AM [Reply]
    *I have a D-LINK DIR-655 and I was having similar problems with my iPhone and iPad. I couldn't find any of the settings that helped you on the DIR-300, but I did stumble across the "Enable Multicast Streams" setting in the "Advanced Network" setting, which was turned off. I turned it on and now Remote works.

    It would seem that Apple is using multicast to implement the Remote/iTunes communication. Of the settings you changed my guess is that the multicast related one actually fixed it and the other two were unrelated.

    Thanks for helping me track that down -- it's great to have this working.
    #5 #1 Joel on 12/30/10 at 06:58 PM [Reply]
    *I also have a DLINK DIR-655, I was able to make it work by using the Advanced Netwrok Setting and turned on Enable Multi-cast. This only worked for me when I had my laptop connected via a cable to the router. My iPad was connected wirelessly.

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