Airfoil is just one of a list of fantastic audio apps from indie developers Rogue Amoeba.
Apple’s own AirPlay technology lets you fling audio from iTunes to other devices on the same network, but it’s limited to iTunes. What about audio playing inside other apps? That’s what Airfoil is for.
So if your musical listening extends beyond iTunes, into applications like Pandora or Last.fm, or if you’re an internet radio nut like me, or just want control of any other audio input you can think of, Airfoil is the application you need.
You don’t need to have an AppleTV or Airport Express to play the audio at the other end, either. Airfoil can send audio to virtual speakers made of software, which you can install for free on any other Mac, iOS device, Windows or Linux computer you have lying around.
You can try out Airfoil for free, and if you like it a license costs $25. For music and radio lovers who listen all the time and want to listen wherever they are in the home or the workplace, it’s a steal.
(You’re reading the 40th post in our series, 50 Essential Mac Applications: a list of the great Mac apps the team at Cult of Mac value most. Read more, or grab the RSS feed.)
Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He also writes for the Press Association and The Morning News. You can find out more at his website, and follow him on Twitter @gilest.
23 responses to “Send Any Audio Anywhere In Your Home Using Airfoil [50 Mac Essentials #40]”
Awesome software, but there is always a slight delay when sending sound to my iPad or iPhone
A have a 10mbit/sec connection and it always lags
Whether I send it from the browser, or spotify or mplayerx its always the same
That is why I kind of stopped using it
For instance, watching a movie from my bed, sending audio to iPhone thats near me, plugging headphones in during the night and it lags, it kinda kills the fun for meÂ
So hopefully one day
And also, make that iOS app universal, its been 2 years now …
will it send audio from youtube and other video applications ilke quicktime and vlc?
it does… I tried it… but audio reach speakers later than the video so it kinda sucs… I was interested in this app but it doesn’t work the way it should…
I use Airfoil daily in our household. Â It can send audio to one or more remote speakers from just about any app on your computer because it hijacks the sound card. Â If you stream to multiple zones at once it will also synch the streams so the audio comes out of each zone at the same time. (There will be a delay between video you see on your Mac and audio sent to a remote zone however as the previous posted mentioned).
there is an option to play video through AirFoil’s video player. doing this will allow the audio and video to be in sync with each other. it won’t work if you’re streaming video (like Netflix), but it will work for videos that are playing from a local drive.
While I appreciate the effort, the Linux version of their Speakers app is hit-or-miss. I’ve never been able to get it up and running on Ubuntu’d legacy Macs, though I’ve heard of others having better luck on different hardware.
Otherwise, Airfoil’s been pretty sweet.Â
No offense to the devs but this app is WAY overpriced. This program does something that the iPhone and iTunes does for free. If you had to pay for an iOS app to use AirPlay I guarantee there’d be an uproar. But no, this is the only way to get universal AirPlay on the Mac, so people are coerced to pay $25 for a simple feature, which is sad. Surely Apple will add universal AirPlay to Lion soon, until then I guess I’ll just wait.
Linux in general is hit or miss.
So by overpriced you mean you think you’re entitled to this for free for some reason and since Apple didn’t give it to you for free, someone else should?
no not at all, but since it’s been essentially built into every music app the iPhone has for free it seems crazy not to have the same on a computer much much more powerful. I should probably should complain at Apple for that though…Second, why can I buy an entire operating system (OS X Lion) for 5 dollars more than AirFoil? It’s just bad pricing.Â
Probably because Apple subsidizes its OS development with profits from Hardware sales, whereas independent software developers can only make money from software sales. So they have to finance the development and support costs with that price.
you can set a delay in VLC that allows you to have video and audio in sync. its something like -2000m/s.
Cool, thanks. Â The delay has become less of a problem now that’s I’ve hardwired the whole house and all the audio zones with Gigabit ethernet. Â Taking the wifi network out of the equation has really helped streaming performance.