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I have no experience with IR technology. If this was a problem with a radio controlled device, I would try different carrier frequencies, channels etc. But from what I can see, there are no comparable settings here.
There are, in fact, different wavelengths, but almost all consumer IR uses the same wavelength (the only company I've heard of using a different wavelength is Bang & Olufsen).
To the IR Receiver, there are pretty much just two states: pulse (where IR light is received) and space (where none is received). As soon as you have multiple devices emit IR pulses at the same time, the IR Receiver will no longer be able to decode it.
Isn’t the IR receiver in the Mac mini assumed to react only to IR signals of a “paired” device (which the Apple Remote is, and the IRTrans of course is not)?
The Apple IR Receiver does decoding in hardware (there's no way to access pulse/space lengths) and also offers some filtering options regarding the Apple Remote IDs (0-255) sent with every button press. But this still requires that what it receives is decodable at all.
Also, I use the IRTrans device for other various tasks, too, and it never triggers anything in remote Buddy except this button release signal (but it triggers the release signal for all buttons of the Apple Remote, not just the “Plus” button in my example).
This is because, as the Apple IR Receiver can no longer decode what it receives, it has to assume the button on the Apple Remote is no longer pressed.
From your experience with IR devices, is there anything I could try, or do I simply have to give up on using an Apple Remote to control the volume of my stereo amplifier?
Unfortunately, I don't see a possibility to use two IR senders at the same time without them interfering the pulse-space-sequences of each other and subsequently make decoding them essentially impossible.
Can you tell me how long this time frame is?
There are several different time frames for the various stages of an Apple Remote command - and the "release" code can be sent at any time.
BUT, assuming that e.g. the Apple Remote period is 100ms, if I chose something like 75ms for the IRTrans repeat period, there could never be an overlap on two successive signals. This means that IF I could tell Remote Buddy to tolerate 1 missing repeat command, it should work, at least theoretically.
It's a good and valid idea in theory, but in practice I'd assume it to not be possible. There are too many variables and parts to this solution for it to align perfectly on such small time frames.
