How AirTunes works

Not that we necessarily care all that much, since we just want to know that it does work, but Macworld sat down with Greg Joswiak, Apple's VP of Hardware Product Marketing, and got him to explain exactly how their new AirPort Express works with AirTunes. The good news is that it'll work with any old WiFi access point, not just an AirPort or AirPort Extreme, but what we're digging on is that AirTunes (installed on your Mac) takes iTunes 4.6's audio stream and then recompresses it using Apple's Lossless Compression format and then beams that to the AirPort Express as an encrypted stream, which then decompresses and outputs it as either a digital or an analog audio signal which you can connect to your stereo.