RutSum

How To Make Your Audio Fly Around Your House, Wirelessly – Airfoil

Well this has been a problem since the day I got a MacBook – how to enjoy audio output on my Creative 2.1 speakers connected to my PC from my MacBook, without having to go through the hassle of removing the wire from the back of my CPU and plugging it in the MacBook. So what exactly am I talking about? Its called Airfoil, and can be used to send audio over a wireless network that uses an Airport Express/Extreme card.

There are two applications – Airfoil and Airfoil Speakers to be used on the source and destination machines respectively. Airfoil Speakers is freely available for Mac OS X, Windows and also for Linux. On the other hand, Airfoil costs $25 and is available for Mac OS X and Windows.

The installation on Mac OS X was easy – an app file to be copied to the hard disk. Airfoil support multiple audio sources, and can also transmit to several machines simultaneously. The downside is that you can only send audio from a specific application, which you have to select in Airfoil. Also due to network lag, you can’t watch videos with the audio on some other system, because there is an obvious lag which makes watching videos useless. This problem doesn’t affect music, which was my main use.

On Mac OS X –

On Linux -

What do you use to route your audio over a network? How do I solve the video-audio lag problem?

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