Hijack your Airport Express

By Matt@smalldog.com

Airport Express is a great product, beautifully designed and executed by Apple. If you don’t know about it, it is basically a wireless base station with a USB port for a printer and audio out for your stereo. You play your music in iTunes and, without any wires, you can hear the music on your stereo. Pretty sweet, huh?

Well you can’t send audio from just any program—you must use iTunes…or at least that’s what Apple wants you to think. Enter Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil

It lets you “hijack” the audio from any application in OS X and transmit it to your Airport Express base station, and on to your stereo.

If you have a laptop, want to watch a DVD, but don’t want to listen through the tinny internal speakers, you can use Airfoil to send the audio wirelessly to your stereo. Problem is, there’s a lag between what happens on your screen and what comes out of the stereo when you’re using Airfoil…this is an inherent limitation of the AIrport Express, not something Airfoil causes. To compensate, I suggest using VLC for the availability of advanced playback preferences, like delay of audio. VLC is my favorite video player since it plays files in most any format, is open-source and free, offers extensive preferences, and just works all the time.

Airfoil is $25 and completely worth it.

By Matt@smalldog.com