Airfoil and Airfoil Satellite make this seamless. I love that I can pass Safari pages back and forth between my iPhone and Mac, but it’s impossible with Apple’s Music app, which is, frankly, baffling to me. But here’s the thing – the rock solid code base that makes that kind of streaming possible is the foundation upon which you can build all manner of crazy audio setups to suit your individual needs. Like me, you probably don’t need to stream to eight devices at once. The place where the rubber hits the road is with more practical applications. All eight played music from iTunes on my Mac perfectly in sync and without a hitch.īut the novelty of playing music over a bunch of devices wears off fast. I quit at eight – three Apple TVs, a Bluetooth Jambox, Bluetooth headphones, my iPhone and iPad, and outdoor speakers connected to a first-gen AirPort Express. I’ll get to a few of the practical uses for Airfoil in a moment, but first, I couldn’t help but see how many devices I could stream to without breaking it. For people with complex audio systems, Airfoil 5 also lets you create speaker groups, and will release its connection to an output device for others to use if the audio source has finished playing. Airfoil also has twenty-one equalizer presets to help you dial in a particular sound for your music. Rogue Amoeba recently released version 5 of Airfoil, which includes a newly designed interface that fits in nicely with El Capitan, streaming to Bluetooth devices, and deep integration with Airfoil Satellite for iOS, Mac, and other platforms, which allows you to control Airfoil for Mac and audio playback, remotely. It wasn’t until I got eight devices streaming at once in perfect sync that I started to see some of the interesting possibilities. Between technologies like AirPlay and Bluetooth, I initially wondered what purpose Airfoil served. Airfoil acts as a hub, routing audio from your Mac to anything connected to your local network.

Airfoil by Rogue Amoeba was like that for me.

Sometimes apps are hard to ‘get’ because you don’t know you have the problem they intend solve until you try them.

Airfoil audio streaming