Airfoil
Wireless whole-house audio from your Mac or PC
What is Airfoil?
Send any audio to the AirPort Express. Send any audio to AirPort Express units, Apple TVs, and even other Macs and PCs, all in sync! Airfoil for Mac gives you your audio - everywhere. You can send audio to multiple outputs around your house, all in sync, and with Airfoil Speakers, you can turn any computer into a remote audio output.
With Airfoil, you can transmit any audio from your computer out to compatible receivers, which are: Apple TVs, Windows, Mac and Linux computers, Android and iOS devices, Third-Party AirPlay Devices.
(Free trial version adds noise after 10 minutes of transmission.)
Airfoil Screenshots
Airfoil Features
Airfoil information
Supported Languages
- English
Comments and Reviews
Tags
- wireless-audio
- airport-express
- wireless-streaming
- airtunes
Category
Audio & MusicRecent user activities on Airfoil
Danilo_Venom edited Airfoil
costanza6221 added Airfoil as alternative(s) to Audio Sharing- onyo added Airfoil as alternative(s) to Chromecast Audio Stream
Airfoil is amazing! When using airplay enabled speakers, it just works. I've noticed some trepidation when it comes to chromecast devices, but for airplay, even using old ipad 3, it's refreshing to see a company that still supports iOS 9 full fat! I've used airfoil to drive five airplay outputs simultaneously and the sound is outstanding and in synch. five stars all the way for me.
Intermittent Audio Pitch Distortion. In an effort to route Apple Music into my high end stereo equipment I tried using Airfoil on my Mac and installed the matching Airfoil Satellite app on an old iPhone, using the headphone jack output into my amplifier. When it worked, it was a reasonable solution. Unfortunately, with no warning it would periodically shift the pitch of the music being played- think slide whistle. It was intolerable. FWIW when the Mac’s disk or network were really exercised it stuttered also. None of these symptoms occurred when routing the sound output through the MacBookPro, so it’s clearly an Airfoil issue. Previously used an Android app called Airtight that worked well emulating an AirPlay receiver until upgrades at Apple caused it to start stuttering. Really don’t want to spend $100 for an AppleTV to pipe sound, but I’m without another good solution at this point.
Tech specs used: mid 2014 rMBPro running macOS 10.11.6 I installed v5.6.4 of Airfoil, and then installed the current Airfoil Satellite App on an old iPhone 5 running iOS 10.3 (latest available from Apple).
As to the claim that this is now built in to OS X: no, it's not.
First of all Airfoil is a paid app, only a free trial is available then you can stream just loudness if you don't pay :(
Then using it with my Android phone I get about 5 seconds of audio delay and it's quite annoying.
Actually I found
WiFi Audio Wireless Speaker easier, cheaper (since it's free :P ) and without delays :)
For background, I did set up a Core 2 Duo with speakers to run the Airfoil Speakers, and streamed audio from Core i7 over a gigabit ethernet. Network should not be a bottleneck, and neither should be computers.
First, the buffer size seems to be approximately 2 seconds, without possibility to even change it? Even for normal music listening it feels too long as track changes are delayed a lot. For any other use, its way too long.
Second, I kept hearing cracking sound like it is still losing some audio, and even some short pauses.
Is there a reason why a functionality like this isn't built-in in Mac OS X?
Mats: It is now ;)
Reply written ago