Airfoil for OS X
I've been playing with Airfoil from Rogue Amoeba, which lets you stream any audio source through your Airport Express.
I have to say I'm pretty impressed that they got this out -- it's working really well, and this is very cool.
If you'll notice, I don't go in much for posting press releases and such (more on that later), but this has been a long-running annoyance with the whole iTunes + Airport Express combo in general (another being that only Airport Express will stream music from FairPlay tracks).
It's something that should actually be built into OS X -- it's really lame that it isn't -- so kudos to Rogue Amoeba for making it happen.
As a note, Rogue Amoeba just rules when it comes to audio on OS X. I have a bunch of favorites, but I use their free SoundSource app several times every day to switch between headphones and speakers.
Posted by drunkenbatmanMarch 04, 2005, at 12:35 AM
Comments (6)
Posted by: Squozen at March 4, 2005 04:51 AM
Has anybody managed to convince VLC to send a 5.1 AC3 stream to the Airport Express and get discrete surround? If I could work out how to do it I'd buy Airfoil in a minute.
Posted by: bickerstaff at March 4, 2005 01:22 PM
I tried Airfoil with iDVD (Star Wars movie) thinking that I can then just use a Mac mini as my DVD player and Airport Express to feed my speakers (I have a weird setup in the living room right now where the Airport Exp is connected to the surround sound while the plasma TV receiver is connected to a couple of dinky speakers - too long to explain why).
Anyway, there is a very noticeable lag between transmission from the computer to to the AE. Of course I noticed the same thing with iTunes where you can still hear the music playing a few seconds after you turn iTunes off.
So, in that respect, Airfoil is probably not the best way to use Airport Express with your movies on iDVD. It reminds me of those silly Japanese movies dubbed in English where the actors' lip movements and the dialogue don't quite match. Haven't tried it with VLC, though. I guess I ought to.
Posted by: ssp at March 5, 2005 06:36 AM
Having WLAN sound in the OS would be neat for sure. I fully agree that including an extra sound output just into iTunes just looks wrong.
On the other hand, I guess that Apple's hard/software just isn't good enough to let us have seamless integration (that delays all relevant video output so it'll still be in sync with the sound) and that Apple has no chance of ever achieving such a state for quasi playthrough apps such as Garage Band which could be rather irritating with delayed output.
Thus, for a change, this design decision of Apple looks like a reasonable one to me as any attempt to allow general sound output via Airport Express may easily end in a situation where the user is irritated by delayed sound output and all sorts of ridiculous help topics and disclaimers would be needed to cover these situations and Apple's ass... for the benefit of about three people who'd actually want to use the feature.
(As I've only seen AE very briefly, let me add a question: When playing music in iTunes via AE, do the 'time remaining' slider or the level meters indicate the state of what iTunes currently sends or of what AE is currently playing? While this is only a small offset, I'd somehow like Apple to make the display reflect what people actually hear at the moment...)
Posted by: mattie at March 5, 2005 10:39 AM
The timing was perfect. I bought the AE 2 weeks ago, registered on the Rogue Amoeba mailing list last week, got informed about Airfoil's release this week. The first thing I tried with it was also hooking it to iDVD, and of course I got the result everybody else got, which was a time gap between audio and video. I guess the easiest (only?) solution will be to make to video output come with a time lapse. I'm sure this will be performed soon by some ingenious programmer.
.m
Posted by: drunkenbatman at March 7, 2005 06:09 PM
I pinged Paul @ Rogue Amoeba with your questions, and got:
Airfoil downmixes to stereo, so it will not play a 5.1 stream in 5.1.As far as watching DVDs/movies goes, the lag is caused by the AirPort Express itself, and there's nothing we can do about it. These two FAQs give more detail:
Watching movies is possible, using VLC or MPlayer, it just takes a bit of configuration.
As for "I'm sure this will be performed soon by some ingenious programmer." I'd very much doubt it, but we'll see what people come up with. Buffering and delaying output of DVD or movie output is a huge undertaking, and the latency isn't constant. I doubt that'll ever happen, but hey, time will tell.
Basically, there are a lot of uses for this, but using it for movies in your home theatre is probably not going to be one of them for right now.
Wasn't there some lawsuits going on about this? In Europe or the USA? Maybe it was just the iPod?
I hope Apple changes this, because making you buy an Airport Express just because you use iTMS is sick. If this was Microsoft doing it we would be up in arms, but since it is Apple and we like iTMS we say nothing.