You already have everything in iTunes.

You've heard good things about rival music services from Napster, Rhapsody, and Yahoo, but you're sticking with Apple's iTunes. With its intuitive interface, iTunes remains the easiest way to rip, organize, play, and buy digital music. Why bother with the hassle of reimporting and reorganizing all your music when you can just use Apple's companion hardware to stream the music to another room?

Get your 99 cents' worth.

The iTunes Music Store makes it simple to buy songs on a whim at 99 cents a pop. But unlike the songs you rip from CD, purchased music is copy protected--they'll play on only an authorized PC and iPod--or through the AirPort Express. While some other digital audio receivers (most notably, the Roku SoundBridge) can stream unprotected music from iTunes, the AirPort remains the only product that will stream the music that you purchased from iTunes.

It works with your existing stereo.

As long as you have a line-in input on your stereo system--even most bargain shelf systems come with an auxiliary input these days--it will be able to connect to the AirPort Express. That, in turn, means you'll be able to hear your iTunes music straight through your trusty stereo without the need for any subsequent expensive upgrades.