Airfoil
Music seems to be our households jam, yeah TV is Okay but I’m finding the coverage of certain world wide pandemic a little suffocating, it’s December and we’re able to escape the world in some of Hallmarks finest holiday and Christmas movies, and the rest of the year movies fill a void which music can’t, but we generally have music streaming or the radio playing 6 to 8 hours a day.
Moving music around your home hasn’t always been the easiest of tasking with the Apple ecosystem, AirPlay worked great - supported speakers went through a period of demand and with the power of a Raspberry Pi you can add airplay to any old amp or separates system.
Time delay to the different speakers wasn’t always handled perfectly from iTunes, and before HomePods there wasn’t many affordable options like the Google home devices available. AirPlay 2 fixed a lot the delay problems, with HomePod Mini’s fixing the speaker - cost issue at £89.
To fix the grouping and time delay problems Rogue Amoeba created AirFoil and its companion app AirFoil Satellite, allowing you to send music to pretty much anywhere, from a very wide range of sources and its all synced too.
AirPlay Devices
Apple TV
HomePod
BlueTooth Devices
Sonos Devices
Google Chromecast and Speakers
We’ve got a no single platform dependency rule in our house, when it comes to Smart Home devices.
It must be able to seamlessly work on both HomeKit and Google Home, most of this is done via Homebridge but it also opened the door for Google Home / Nest speakers to used in room. Allowing control of smart home devices without the need to carry a phone around (way before the HomePod and HomePod mini was released)
So with all the key rooms - included the shed musically connected, with the use of Airfoil anyone can send any music source from their Mac over the network to those speakers, time delay was taken care of and the house filled with rich sounds.
Airfoil allows groups of speakers to be created, whilst keeping the individual speaker accessible to be streamed to independently.
iTunes switched to Music - AirPlay 2 announced and released and Airfoil continues to just work as it did before.
Airfoil Satellite
Satellite works great as a remote control for the Mac which is suppling the source media, you’re able to play / pause / skip tracks as you would normally and choose which speakers and what volume level the media will be played on. Airfoil Satellite is available on both iOS and MacOS.
