For those that don’t know, Airtunes is a feature of the current Airport Express, which allows you to broadcast your music from iTunes to any speakers hooked up to the Airport Express. In my house, for example, we have our Airport Express in the living room, which means that at any point, I can tell iTunes to play music not through the speakers in my computer, but to the speakers in the living room (which are hooked up to the Airport Express). Airtunes lets me do that, and its quite an amazing little feature.
The one downside of Airtunes (other than the occasional skip), is that you can only transfer audio from iTunes wirelessly, and any other programs get ignored. Well, luckily, the fine folks at
Rogue Amoeba offer a very good tool called Airfoil, which allows you to broadcast all of your audio, iTunes and any other program, to your Airport Express (and now Apple TV!) – see the screen shot below!
- control the volume on the target stereo hooked up through airtunes (not possible with iTunes on its own)
- output to multiple speakers throughout the house (iTunes has this ability too but Airfoil extends it to all applications)
- play video and have synced audio using Airfoil’s Video Player
- turn any computer into a speaker (basically you can play your music through any computer in the house, very cool)
- use it on Mac OR Windows!
The one downside that I see to the beauty that is this app is that its not free, but $25 (there is a demo version on their site that you can try, fully featured). Still, for all of the added features that this application provides, its still quite worth money. If you have an Airport Express or Apple TV and aren’t using Airtunes, I highly suggest you check it out. But once you do, be sure and pick up Airfoil.