February 2009.
I have two Macs in my office: a MacBook that serves as my main machine and an old Mac Mini on a second desk. I often listen to news and music on the nice speakers plugged into the Mac Mini. Acoustically, the speakers sound better on that side of my office, and I don’t fancy running a patch cable.
I looked for a means to control iTunes over the network, since it was inconvenient to have to wander over to the Mac Mini to adjust the volume or change the program and I didn’t feel like spending US$100 on an AirPort Express unit (which are more like US$130 here in México). I was surprised at the poor pickings. iTunes Remote Control (iTRC) is fine but fairly spartan. You can control the volume, skip tracks, select play lists, and create temporary play lists from search results, but it doesn’t really allow you to see your library. netTunes looks great, but doesn’t work on Leopard.
Then I stumbled on Airfoil, and I realized that I was trying to solve the wrong problem. I didn’t really want to run iTunes remotely and control it locally. I wanted to run iTunes locally and pipe its output to the remote speakers. Airfoil allows you to do just this; you can listen to the output of iTunes on the speakers connected to a remote networked Mac, Windows, or Linux machine, AirPort Express unit, or Apple TV.
Better yet, Airfoil is able to send sound from any local program to remote speakers, so it doesn’t matter whether you use iTunes, RealPlayer, Safari, or any other program to listen to news or music, you can still listen using your remote speakers. You can assign different destinations to different programs; I listen to system sounds (e.g., the beep when mail arrives) and Skype on the speakers on my local machine and iTunes and RealPlayer on the speakers on my remote machine.
Airfoil runs on both Mac and Windows machines and costs $25 for a single-user (multiple-machine) licence and $46 for a family licence. The free trial version adds noise to any transmission after 10 minutes, but in the meantime allows you to evaluate its convenience and functionality. Out of the box, Airfoil can send sound to AirPort Express units and Apple TVs. To use the speakers on remote Mac, Windows, or Linux machines, they must be running the free Airport Speakers program.
Airfoil and Airfoil Speakers are written by Rogue Amoeba Software, who have an interesting range of programs for editing sound files, listening to internet and satellite radio, and controlling sound on Mac OS.
Airfoil appears to explain the poor state of iTunes remote control programs. Why go the effort of solving this problem at the application level when you can solve it at a lower level for all programs?
Copyright © Alan Watson 2009