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AirPort Express Streaming Audio From Any Program
Foobaz writes "Until now, the only application that can play audio on Apple's AirPort Express has been Apple's own iTunes. But Rogue Amoeba, makers of Audio Hijack, just released Airfoil, a program that lets you redirect anything to your AirPort Express, like streaming audio from mplayer, RealPlayer, or VLC."
It emits noise after using for ten minutes, unless you purchase the "pro" version
They don't like to share their toys with outsiders.
Don't flame me. I'm an Apple user. So I know what I speak of.
From the site, under "Buy" on the right:
*Before purchase, noise is overlaid on all transmissions longer than 10 minutes.
They answer that question in the FAQ. Yes, the audio will be out of sync. This can be solved with VLC or MPlayer by manually synchronizing the video and audio. This cannot be solved with DVD Player.app, RealPlayer, or anything else that won't let you decouple audio from video. There's probably nothing they can really do about this.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
why not turn on sharing in both of your itunes? then you can access one another's libraries.
i saw the baby, and the baby looked at me
That is dishonest marketing. JustePort has been doing that for quite some time. It's even more dishonest when Rogue Amoeba probably relied on JustePort to write the AirFoil.
It's lossless, but there's lag.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
There is a sync issue with this. It's got to do with the APEX standard and nothing the DEV's can do about it.
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However. This is not a problem since VLC and MPlayer can move the sound all around. So just watch your torrents with VLC(which I guess you do anyway) and make the sound be a few seconds early. Easy peasy.
More info at http://www.rogueamoeba.com/forum/ubb/Forum7/HTML/
Sure. Look into the hardware from El Gato.
Mod point free since 2001
Yes it involves encryption. The signal going to an Airport Express is encrypted Apple Lossless.
If Apple didn't like it and wanted to be proprietary, they wouldn't have used Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), which is a well documented and supported protocol, as the transport method.
they're the first high-profile implementation of the algorithm that Jon Lech Johansen reverse-engineered:
:D
(http://nanocrew.net/blog/apple/revairtunes.html)
and yes... this is THAT Jon... the one that got yanked into court for reverse-engineering the DVD encryption. all hail Jon!
what we need now is for mplayer and VLC and the others to implement airport express streaming directly in the media player...
I purchased Audio Hijack to rip AAR to my iPod (you know... before the election) It was crashing on my iBook however. Rogue's support was great, we went back and forth with emails of things to try for a few days. The conclusion was me getting a new build that cured the problem. YMMV of course, but I'd buy from them again.
/. rarity)
This is a completely unsolicited endorsement (a
Currently bidding on sig
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2004
I've been using this solution for playing DIVX files from my laptop (which is connected to my projector, while the audio is routed to AirPort Express) for some time, and works well, thanks to the author's knowledge, and the power of VLC !
When they realize that everyone is buying an AirPort Express.
Fortunately the AP Express is not a single purpose device, like other streaming audio solutions. The printing and network extending capabilities make it well worth the $125.
A great addition to the AirPort would be a remote control with TV display. I'm visualizing being able to see my track info on my TV screen and control the tracks with a remote. I know that there is a TiVO solution (that I won't link to, use google) that works like this, but the cost of all the hardward puts you up there with the non-AirPort Express solution. Then again multitasker capabilties of TiVO also increase it's value over the single task streaming audio devices.
"Give me taste, give me funk, give me fury, gimme some more."
ok... so if they are using RTSP to stream the bits, they're still using a proprietary method to encode those bits :) so we're both right? or both wrong? ;)
As explained in this blog:
RAOP protocol itself has already been analyzed by DVDJon and its implementation is availabe as an open source C# software called JustePort. RAOP protocol is based on RTSP wrapped with AES and RSA cryptography, on which Apple Lossless files are streamed.
AES and RSA are also open methods in conjunction with RTSP. Seems pretty open to me.
And also routers that can do this? Its a cool feature that i'd like to have but dont want to switch to macs
I don't know about routers, but you can do what I and a lot of others do and have a media server hooked up to your home theater setup through either wireless or (preferably) wired ethernet (still better than wireless for speed and stability). I'm sure there are probably some NAS devices that can act similarly at a lower cost than a full-fledged PC. I admit that I don't quite "get" what's so special about AirPort Express because it seems to actually do quite a bit less than what I'm used to, but maybe it's just the convenience of having this thing that's "always on", I don't know. And of course it's sort of cheap (though not that cheap).
But if you're bent on using Windows and/or Linux and you don't mind paying a little more for actually greater functionality, then get a cheap little server box, stick a good sound card in there and hook it up to your stereo. I've got mine running iTunes, which I can then pipe either to my laptops around the house or through my main stereo speakers. (It'll obviously work in reverse too, pulling any music I've got on my laptops and playing it through the stereo speakers.) Of course, it also streams video and whatever else I want to throw at it, and displays it all on my TV.
I can control it through Windows Remote Desktop Connection, so I have no need for a separate monitor. If you're running Linux, you can do the same with a VNC client (though VNC is a lot slower and is harder to deal with as a real remote desktop).
---But it requires iTunes, so there's one more thing that I'm not going to buy from apple.---
You do realize that iTunes is free, and works just fine with all sorts of file formats you can rip from your own cd's or buy elsewhere right? It'll even convert your WMA files to AAC.
---If I buy a Chevy vehicle, I want it to work with any gasoline that's been refined properly. I don't want to buy Chevy gasoline, or gasoline from an "approved Chevy distributor". Same goes for my music... If I buy something that plays music, I just want it to play my goddamned music... Not music from store A, or through service B.----
Sounds pretty much like iTunes fits the bill for you then, as long as you avoid buying music downloads from any seller with proprietary DRM (pretty much everyone selling major label songs for download, Apple included).
--- Until things change, Apple ain't seeing a dime from me.---
You should really stick it to them by downloading it and using it for free then.
This product finally allows me to stream my Oggs to my Express. Yay!
Hey. In case anybody cares, there really isn't a need for VNC, as long as you're not using Windows 98 on your media server. Or maybe XP Home too. Windows NT-based operating systems (i.e. 2000 & XP Pro) allow you to use Terminal Services as you're doing to get into them. There's a Remote Desktop client available for both Linux and Mac OS X (www.rdesktop.org).
If you're using Linux as your media server, just connect to it using a remote X-Server. It might be a little less intuitive for a Windows user to understand, but you can locally display your programs on your client that are actually running on your server. The client can be Windows, Mac OS X or Linux. On free windows X server can be obtained at www.cygwin.com.
I'm sure you know all this, but this is just in case anyone else is reading your post looking for options.
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