If you download the the company’s free Airfoil Speakers Touch app and install it on your iPhone or iPod touch, those devices become available on your local network (you can’t yet stream to them over the Internet).
There’s another neat trick you can perform with Airfoil. You’ll love it (even though your neighbors might not).
Have you ever wanted to have a party and pipe music into several rooms at the same time? This is the perfect way to do so-send music to an AirPort Express connected to speakers in one room to an Apple TV in the living room and to a Mac or PC connected to speakers in another room. You can stream music to as many devices on your network as you want: just click on the Transmit button for each of them. There’s really not much more you need to do.
Airfoil uses some of the same technology found in its Audio Hijack Pro software the first time you want to stream music, you’ll need to either quit and relaunch the source program so its audio can be “hijacked”, or Airfoil can install software that will let it hijack each time you want.Ĭlick on the Transmit button to the left of any device, and your music streams. To stream to another computer you need to download and run Airfoil Speakers on the client computer the other devices get spotted automatically. In the example on the left, you can see my Mac (Computer), my AirPort Express, my Apple TV, and another Mac (Pequod) all these devices are available on my local network. Launch Airfoil and you’ll see a small window. (And, for extra credit, it can even stream to an iPhone or iPod touch.)Īirfoil’s window lets you choose your source application and the device to which it streams music.Starting to use Airfoil to stream music is almost too easy. On top of that, Airfoil can stream more than just iTunes: in fact, it can stream audio from any application, whether it be an audio application, such as RealPlayer or QuickTime Player, or your Web browser or other software that’s playing audio. It duplicates some of what I explained in my earlier article-streaming to an AirPort Express or Apple TV-but can also stream to other computers on your network, whether they run OS X, Windows or Linux.
One application that has some neat streaming tricks up its sleeve is Rogue Amoeba’s $25 Airfoil 3 ( ). Sometimes, however, you may want to stream music from other applications: perhaps you listen to Internet radio with a dedicated program or you may have music-in FLAC format, for example-that you can’t listen to with iTunes or you may want to stream the audio from Pandora or Last.fm to speakers in a different room from your Mac. And using them, you could only stream from iTunes. While the techniques I described work just fine, they were limited in that they required an Apple AirPort Express or an Apple TV. Traditionally AirPlay/AirTunes audio streaming has been available solely from iTunes, and it is only recently that Apple has expanded it allowing Mac users to use an AirPlay destination as their system sound device in OS X Mountain Lion.A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about streaming music from iTunes to your stereo. This limitation with regard to AirPlay audio streaming has actually been an issue for years, going back to when the technology was known as AirTunes and supported audio only.
It’s also worth noting that even the Apple TV, which adds support for external AirPlay speakers in the recent 5.1 update also has the same limitation on streaming audio during video playback.ĪirPlay can, of course, be used from iTunes to stream the entire video to an Apple TV, but even in this case there is no standard way to stream only the audio component while playing back video on a Windows PC itself. Since watching a video on your PC generally requires you to be located in front of the PC, Apple is obviously (and incorrectly) making the assumption that you would only play your audio through directly connected speakers in this case. AirPlay audio seems to be primarily intended for streaming things like music to a remote set of speakers located elsewhere in your house. A: Unfortunately, this is indeed the case.