We’ve had an Apple Airport Express in our basement for some time, and often use it to stream music from iTunes on one of our Macs, or even the MacMiniMedaCenter in the living room. But, yesterday, while we were doing chores around the house, I wanted to listen to some Pandora streamed music.
So, I finally decided to pull the trigger and purchase AirFoil from Rouge Amoeba. This handy little piece of software will allow you to capture audio of any Mac (or Windows) device, and stream it to a number of devices. You an either capture audio from an application that is running, or grab all audio output via a software ‘shim’ that can be installed. With this, we were easily able to listen to Pandora on our media center, and also stream that same music to the basement. When I get a TV for the bedroom and put the AppleTV back onto the network, the software will also allow us to stream to that device.
In fact, you can also stream audio to any iPhone or iPod Touch. I installed the (free) client on my iPhone, and plugged it into a small set of speakers I have, and was able to listen to the streaming audio on our back porch while taking a break. They also have free “speaker” software that you can install on any Mac, Windows or Linux computer, to allow it to also play the networked audio stream. So, you can capture an audio stream from any Mac or PC, and stream it to any other Mac, PC, Linux, iPod Touch, iPhone, Airport Express or AppleTV.
In other words, it’s pretty freaking amazing.
$25 for a single license, $46 for a 5 Mac family pack. Another piece of awesome, cool and useful software.
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