Wireless Network / Filesharing / Airtunes ??

Please bear with me on this one, I am a complete novice when it comes to wireless / networking.

I have an iMac in our basement. It is our "hub" computer. I am looking at purchasing a 12" iBook from the refurb store.

Here is what I am envisioning, please let me know if this is possible, and how I would set it up.

I want to keep all of our music on the iMac. The DSL modem is downstairs so I will also keep the Airport Extreme Base Station down there as well.

My stereo is upstairs so I also plan on getting the Airport Express with Airtunes for the upstairs to play the music on the iMac downstairs. Could be overkill, but I don't see any other way around that.

Finally, the catch in this scenario.

Can I control the music on the iMac downstairs, from the ibook upstairs using the wireless network?

Thanks for everything -

Here's what you could do:

1. Turn on "Share my iTunes Library" on your iMac.
2. Use your Powerbook to connect to the iMac's iTune's Library.
3. Once you set up your Airport Express, in iTunes (on your PB) there will be an option on the bottom right that let's you choose to play the music through AirTunes.

This way you would be streaming from the iMac to the Powerbook, and from the Powerbook to the Airport Express.

It should work.

Let me hasten to add to SurfWax's excellent instructions that you will need to have the iMac logged on to share the iTunes. Jeremy, I basically have the same set up you envision, with an iBook G4 and iMac 20, with the iBook upstairs and the iMac downstairs.

It all works easily and well, except that (unlike Win) you have to be logged onto each machine to share the iTunes -- that is, you cannot access files on a machine that doesn't have somebody logged on.

I use a similar set up (G4 pbook and iMac) with three Airport Expresses so I can pipe music to three rooms. I also have an old laptop that streams music from the iMac but plays into a "Hi Fi" through the headphone socket. You need OS 10.3 or later to run Airtunes.

Works a treat.