Indent four

With Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil tool you can stream audio from any Mac application to  speakers that are connected to an Airport Express, not just from within iTunes. It’s a pitty that you need these wireless basestation just to stream audio and the people at RogueAmoeba thought just the same: they released the free Airfoil Speakers addon: install it on a Mac, PC or Linux based computer and you have an extra output for Airfoil. And recently even an Airfoil speakers for Iphone/Ipod touch was released. Unfortunately good old iTunes still ignores Airfoil Speakers. Why hasn’t apple released a system preference or sharing option for this? I mean, if they can do it for MacBook Air DVD drives, why not for an audio output…..

So alls well that ends well with Airfoil. Not quite. I still had one major issue. Airfoil Speakers always play to the default System Audio output. You can set it in System Preferences if you have more than one audio interface, like an iMic or extra audio card in your Mac Pro. There was no way to select an extra audio output in Airfoil Speakers.  Why would I want this? If I can redirect Airfoil Speakers to my iMic and hook that up to my stereo set I can at the same time use my default audio output for application sounds, and the occasional game. And I can stream music from my MacMini media hub to several Airtunes/Airfoil speakers setup throughout the house (the kitchen, the hobby room, you name it) without having to buy Airport Express basestation when there are already computers in the room.

So I asked the Rogue Amoeba crew for an extra option to select audio output. I got a confirmation that it was an interesting feature. Then it became silent fore a few months. And with a recent update (3.3.4, but it might have been added in 3.3), there it was….  a shiny new pull down selector. Thanks RogueAmoeba!