Airfoil, the Whole-House Music Streaming Killer App

iTunes has had the ability to stream music to a remote set of speakers for a while now. At first it was just devices like the Airport Express, but now they’ve struck agreements with a bunch of different companies that make speaker docks and A/V units so that iTunes can stream to them too. Being able to play music out of a remote pair of speakers is great, but there are a few key limitations to AirPlay that have always left me less than sold on the idea.

First, AirPlay is all about iTunes streaming to something. Let’s face it, the only reason most people use iTunes is because it’s the application for synchronizing music to iPods. It works fine as long as your music library isn’t enormous, but it’s far from the most feature-rich music player out there and its support for things like Internet radio hasn’t improved much in 7 years. If you want to stream Pandora or Last.fm to remote speakers, AirPlay  just doesn’t fit the bill.

Second, the device set that recognizes AirPlay is still fairly limited and decidedly non-free. If you want an Airport Express, you’ll be paying $100 for what is essentially a wireless access point with an audio out jack. This has always rubbed me the wrong way. I already have a computer with an audio out jack and a network connection, why can’t I just stream to that? For that matter, why can’t my computers stream audio to each other?

Enter AirFoil.

Attach AirFoil to an application (pretty much any application), and it captures that application’s audio and sends it to one or more sets of speakers. AirFoil can stream to any AirPlay device as well as anything running the companion AirFoil Speakers application. The AirFoil server application runs on OS X or Windows, and there are versions of AirFoil Speakers for OS X, Windows, Linux and iOS (meaning it works on iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches too). The AirFoil server keeps all the audio streams to the various speakers magically in sync. AirFoil uses Bonjour service notification messages to find and advertise speakers, so AirFoil can see any speakers on the local network without the need for configuring anything.

When I want to listen to music from my iTunes library in my living room, I just fire up AirFoil on my desktop in the bedroom and stream through my media center PC in the living room. If I want an additional set of speakers in the kitchen (because hey, why not?) I can hook a pair of speakers to my phone and run AirFoil Speakers on it. This is something that would have cost me hundreds of dollars in additional, purpose-bought hardware to do without software like this. I’m extremely impressed by AirFoil; if any of this sounds remotely intriguing to you, I’d really recommend giving it a try.

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