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."

Comments

Sync issues

[KoopaTroopa]

Has anyone used this? Are there any sync issues if running audio from (as an example) VLC from a video file?

Re:Sync issues

[Elwood P Dowd]

There's probably nothing they can really do about this.

I said that, but it's not true. They could write software that would buffer everything coming out of the compositing engine, or perhaps just one window, and play it back a second or two later. Obviously this would be resource intensive and prone to annoyances, but it could work on big, burly machines.

Still not the only feature I want

[Elwood P Dowd]

I want to be able to use my computer as an AirTunes sink, not a source. I'm not about to buy an Airport Express, but I'd like to be able to pipe audio from my girlfriend's iBook to my desktop's speakers.

Then yeah, I'd like to be able to do it with DVD Player.app as well as iTunes.

Re:Still not the only feature I want

[jacksonj04]

Shared Library actually works better than AirTunes in this regard - a shared library works irrespective of what each person is doing, unlike AirTunes where iTunes needs to do the work on one machine.

So, with shared library you can both listen to different things!

Will the foil fly?

[erick99]

Airfoil looks like a great product,however, I can't quite tell if it is something that Apple will dislike given how proprietary Apple can be.

Re:Will the foil fly?

[beej69]

huh? do you have any URL's to back up your claim? afaik, apple purposefully used a proprietary algorithm. Jon Lech Johansen (yes... DVD Jon) was the one to reverse-engineer it:
http://nanocrew.net/blog/apple/revairtunes.html

Re:Will the foil fly?

[isa-kuruption]

My claims? Considering Apple uses RTSP for it's Quicktime streaming it would only make sense for them to use the thing they know for their other products. Any more proof? Shall I telnet to port 554 on my Airport Express and show you the RTSP signature? How about a Apple Press Release in which they updated RTSP in the Airport firmware. I'm sure Apple always updates protocols not supported by their hardware!

Audio Hijack

[mailman-zero]

How do they accomplish this? Is there any sort of conversion on the fly being done to the audio? Are they piping it through iTunes somehow or implementing this on their own? Does this involve encryption algorithms?

Re:I don't want to troll but:

[Anonymous Coward]

Marketshare = 2 or 3%
Installed Base (the actual users) = at least 12%

these figures might be a year or two old, but you get the idea.

Re:Apple's not going to like this.

[lpp]

Er, no. Apple loves people to play with their toys but only in Apple approved ways.

I am the developer for QTConvert, an app that just exposes the QuickTime API for format exporting, a feature normally only available for folks who've upgraded to QuickTime Pro. When iTMS first came out, the QuickTime API still supported exporting from Protected AAC to whatever formats were valid targets. However QuickTime Pro had disabled this, by doing a simple check. Since I didn't really care to have my tunes in an encumbered format, and was only using the API Apple had exposed, I slapped together the app and let it loose.

Within a few months, Apple had released an updated to several of their iApps and to the QuickTime API essentially removing the Protected AAC format as an import format for conversion.

So while I wasn't doing anything illegal and was making simple use of their API, it wasn't something Apple liked. Now I'm sure my little app wasn't the main reason, or even a big reason, for the API change, but the timing is certainly intriguing enough.

So the OP was quite on topic about this point, if a bit paranoid.

Re:Yeah, that iTunes program is wicked expensive

[Theaetetus]

The problem is that I ~have~ downloaded iTunes in the past, and I didn't like it. Apple's software, like their hardware, has many design decisions that are for the benefit of Apple, not me as an end consumer. Even Quicktime is invasive (why the hell do they have that load on startup???).

Why does Windows load IE's render engine on startup?
Also, what's invasive about iTunes?

Audio players are free these days... Winamp, musicmatch, microsoft, apple... Hell, I've even written my own. The fact that they've locked out their hardware so that only ~their~ free music player will work with it is incentive enough for me to steer clear.

Yes... except for XPlay for Windows, gtkpod for Linux, etc. Those free music players work just fine with the iPod.

Plus, you know something - you don't even need a player, period. Mount an iPod and view the hidden files on there: there's a "Music" hidden folder, and all of your MP3s are inside there as hidden files. Simply copy in your MP3s and set their flags to be hidden too, and they'll show up as if you sync'd with iTunes, XPlay, gtkpod, etc.

-T

Re:Dishonest marketing

[steve_bryan]

Did you try to check your claim before making the accusation? If Rogue Amoeba uses an iTunes API to add the audio output as a stream to iTunes then iTunes may be doing all the heavy lifting of conversion to lossless audio, the RSA and AES cryptography, etc. It seems entirely possible that they are just doing audio capture as they always have with their main product and letting Apple do the rest of the work.

Checking facts seems like it would be the right thing to do before casting aspersions. Now pardon me while I go off to see if Apple has added a convenient new API call to iTunes.