Under The Microscope

Software in Action: Airfoil Speakers in the Lab

Here at Rogue Amoeba, we sometimes hear about interesting uses of our software that are worth sharing. Starting today, we’ll be doing just that, in an occasional series called Software in Action.

Airfoil in Action ThumbnailAfter seeing some tweets about how he was using Airfoil Speakers, we got in touch with Joachim Bengtsson, who gave us a great overview on how he’s using Airfoil Speakers.

I work for Blekinge Institute of Technology, more specifically their labs (called REAL), where I write Cocoa and Erlang all day long. The Mac Minis are for running the distributed simulation engine we’re working on there. The same day I had performed this experiment, which you probably saw on my twitter; I had been tasked to prepare the minis, install erlang and xcode on them and such, and I just couldn’t help but to throw Airfoil into the mix.

When my coworkers aren’t around, I max the iMacs (four of them) plus my own computer for some pretty good sound (like in the video on my blog); sometimes one of them hiccups a bit and gets de-synced, but I’m always impressed every time it re-syncs without even stuttering or noticeably changing pitch or anything like that, within a second.

While he normally uses Airfoil and the free Airfoil Speakers with a half-dozen machines, in the screenshot you can see Joachim playing audio through fifteen different machines. We’ve stress-tested Airfoil with multiple AirPort Express units, as well as multiple machines, but this tops any testing we’ve done. Thankfully, Airfoil is up to the challenge!

Are you using our products in an interesting or obscure way? Let us know!

4 Responses to “Software in Action: Airfoil Speakers in the Lab”

  1. Nobody says:

    Would you mind posting the link to the video or blog that Joachim is refering to? Can’t find it.


  2. Christopher Gillespie says:

    I have an OpenVPN TAP bridge running from home to the office. I can’t connect to the remote Airport Express in the office from home, but I can broadcast via Airfoil to the work computer and then hijack that to the remote airport express. Works like a charm.

    Yes, its a bit clumsy but it keeps my play count and last played metadata current.


  3. Joachim Bengtsson says:

    Paul linked my first video from the article; I made one more, found here: http://tr.im/airfoil_win2


  4. seb says:

    Too bad it’snot up for Ubuntu 9.10


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