Monday June 15, 2009

The Magic of Airfoil

by Milind Alvares on June 15, 2009

airfoil From the creators of AudioHijack, comes a tool, so powerful, that it will break your entire perception of digital audio. Airfoil from Rogue Amoeba has been installed on all my macs and PCs, and the resulting orchestra is so amazing, I couldn’t believe my ears!

So what exactly is Airfoil? A few years ago Apple introduced the Airport Express which allowed you to wirelessly play audio from iTunes on your computer to any speaker system connected to that Airport Express unit. However, Apple restricted that usage only to iTunes—typical. Rogue Amoeba happens to be one of the experts when it comes to understanding digital audio on the Mac, and they created a tool that allowed you to selectively beam any system audio to an Airport Express unit without getting iTunes into the mix. This audio is selective, so if you were transmitting some internet radio station over, your system’s ‘bings’ and ‘bongs’ wouldn’t get caught in the mix.

airfoil

The Rogues of course didn’t stop at that. The current version allows you to transmit to other Macs, PCs, AppleTVs as well as iPhones. I once played something on my iMac » MacBook » PC » iPhone. And the best part is, it all just worked! There’s no network configuration, no weird setup, and no dealing with an out of this world linux-like interface.

airfoil-speaker
The Airfoil speaker HUD

There are three aspects to the Airfoil system: the Airfoil app, the Airfoil video player, and the Airfoil speakers. The Airfoil app is used to control the transmission of audio, the Video app is specially designed to introduce delay in video so it stays in sync with remote speakers, and the Airfoil speakers, while the speakers are free to install on any Mac, Windows-PC, Linux as well as the iPhone. The Airport Express and AppleTV will automatically show up.

airfoil touch Once you launch the Airfoil app, it will list out any ‘speakers’ it can find in the local network. To play audio on a remote computer, just click the respective icon and within a second the audio will be transmitting. You can control the volume as well as use the equaliser to adjust tone and balance. The audio quality definitely suffers if you’re playing some high resolution audio on good quality speakers, but for most part it’s pretty good.

The application preferences allow you to set a device to automatically transmit whenever it detects a certain speaker. This would potentially allow you to play a song in iTunes using the iPhone Remote app, and then launch the Speakers app on the iPhone to remotely pull music. And when Airfoil has no speakers to transmit to, it will resume playing audio on the system, so it won’t affect your daily routine.

airfoil-video-player
Airfoil video player can play any format QuickTime can

Hooked

There’s so many potential scenarios where this app will come in handy. Say you want to watch a movie, but don’t want to disturb anyone. Play it in the Airfoil Video Player (which delays video) and listen to the audio 10 feet away using your iPhone. Heck you could have 5 people listen to that audio from 10 feet away. Or if like me you have the good audio system hooked up to the PC in the other room. Or you’re having a party in the garden, but all your music is on your Mac Pro. Or, well, I could go on.

All in all I’m loving the Airfoil app, and although I don’t use it that often given my needs, I’d highly recommend it to someone who does have such an audio setup. The trial version inserts noise after 10 minutes of playback, which is perfect to test it out with your setup.

And Giveaway!

The Rogues have decided to let us give away a couple of licenses for you readers. One license goes out to a lucky tweetback. The second, is for the one who can tell us the perfect scenario that they would use Airfoil in. Standard giveaway rules apply.

Winners: idl3mind on twitter and Angus for the comment. Thanks for participating!

Tags: airfoil, mac, paul kafasis, Reviews, rogue amoeba, Software | Retweet

Reader Comments

brnmbrns twitter.com/brianxburns: I don’t get to keep as much music on my iPhone as I would like to because it’s a 2G and it’s filled with more important files than music.

I would love to win a license so I don’t have to plugged in to the mac and can wear my headphones while streaming music from the mac to my phone while I’m playing guitar to learn guitar parts and stuff like that.

Oh, and I’m broke as a joke. :\
Phil P. cloontang72: I want to get this so I can put headphones on and not wake anyone up at night while watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
Teucher: Airfoil is awesome. The only thing that I’m missing, is some kind of playlist feature for the Airfoil Video Player. It’s a little annoying, when you want to watch a bunch of short clips, and have to open them manually one after another.
Alexander: Hi! I would like to win a license! Thanks for considering me. I have AudioHijackPro. It’s amazing and really well done!
Paul J Natsch: I’m disabled and use MacSpeech Dictate to do most of the writing on my iMac. It’s an invaluable tool for me since I’m unable to use a physical keyboard. However, to work properly MacSpeech Dictate needs to be used in a quiet environment. I have an iPod touch 2g with a nice pair of noise canceling earphones which allows me to listen to music while dictating without affecting the performance of MacSpeech Dictate. But when I’m doing something on my iMac that requires sound while using MacSpeech Dictate I run into problems. For example playing a game like World of Warcraft. In such situations I have to turn the sound way down or off completely.

Clearly something like Airfoil could solve this problem by pumping the sounds through the noise canceling earphones attached to my iPod touch 2g. So I would be very grateful if I was chosen for a free license. Thank you for your time.

-PN
Jorge S twitter.com/indyfilms17: I’ve been drooling over this app for a while, I’ve used the trial. It’s GREAT!! My perfect scenario is like you mentioned, watching a movie from my bed late at night, without bothering anyone.

Another scenario is listening to music across my house, through all different computers, or scaring an innocent person who walks by a computer by playing loud music or scary laughter through it.
goto11 marintellect.com: The perfect scenario is to run Pandora on the Mac Mini connected to the home stereo, and stream it to the iPhone connected to the mini speaker system by the backyard barbecue, at the same time I stream it to the AirPort Extreme in the bedroom at the other end of the house that’s connected to another set of speakers… Uninterrupted music inside and outside the house; perfect for a party!
Rudy Fiorillo Website: I have been hooking up my macbook pro to my Sharp Aquos TV to watch Hulu/Joost Movies etc. The only problem is I had to use the sound from my laptop and not enjoy the sound from my theatre system — I read this article – couldn’t believe it was as easy as the article stated — I tried it, THIS SOFTWARE IS AWESOME — I can’t believe how beautifully it works. This is heaven. I can’t say enough words as to how terrific this software is. A MUST for anyone who wants to transmit sound from one source to another. Buy it now.
Apoorv Khatreja rutsum.com: Airfoil really is a neat app, but a limitation to it is that it will only work good for audio files. If you try to send the audio from a video file over a wireless network via Airfoil, there will always be some lag. I wanted to use Airfoil to watch a movie on a big screen (connected to a Mac) and listen to the audio via speakers connected to a Mac. There was a lag of 1-2 seconds which I tried very hard to remove but was unsuccessful. More here – http://rutsum.com/airfoil
Ryan: @Apoorv: Did you even read the review? The Airfoil Video Player is built for dealing with lag. As Teucher mentioned though, it does need a playlist feature. Been using Airfoil for a while now, and it’s been great (count me out of the giveaway)
Apoorv Khatreja rutsum.com: @Ryan

Yeah, read the review, but I guess just didn’t read that part. The video player is a nifty feature! I didn’t even know that it was a part of Airfoil. Thanks for the heads up.
Rudy Fiorillo: Ryan — the only problem is that you can’t use airfoil video player with Hulu or Joost etc. — it will only allow you to drag over quicktime or itune stuff. Any ideas for Hulu or Joost?
Milind Alvares soggysh.it: @Rudy: You’re right. Rogue Amoeba does need to develop a way, perhaps an audio driver, that delays audio no matter what’s playing. Or maybe they could integrate with Plex in some way.
Teucher twitter.com/Teucher: @Milind: You have to delay the video, not the audio.
Rudy Fiorillo Website: Hey Teucher — I agree — it is the video — but wouldn’t it be wonderful if they came up with something that would make it work the right way — if they have gotten this far, they should be able to take the next step — hope someone who does this kind of stuff see the value in developing the next “Airfoil”.
Angus glitchwork.thevalency.com: Perfect scenario:

I’m at my neighbours house and I wan’t to play them a really awesome song I just got. Problem is, I don’t have it on my iphone yet as I am yet to sync.

I just use remote.app to play the song on my computer at home, and airfoil to stream it back to the iphone, and then play it trough a set of speakers.
Jay twitter.com/skyeyjay: Airfoil is really Cool and Interesting App.

i just tweet your Airfoil and link back to your web.
Please let me be the one of your competition list.
Thank You !
Phil P.: When is the giveaway going to happen? I want Airfoil!
Milind Alvares soggysh.it: Winners: idl3mind on twitter and Angus for the comment. Thanks for participating!