My audio setup
We don't live in a huge flat, far from it. But we have two computers: the main family computer, an iMac G5 in the big corridor, and my laptop, often in the living room.
For a while, we would listen to music on the iMac, and when Hermine is sleeping, the music would play on the laptop through iTunes sharing. But there was one main drawback to this approach: if we're moving a lot, there is no way to listen to the same music synchronized on both computers.
A couple weeks ago, I decided to try to remedy to this. I quickly discovered Airfoil and Airfoil speakers: Airfoil runs on the iMac, sending its music to the local speaker or to the laptop, and sometimes, like right now, only to the laptop. To control iTunes remotely, I'm using iTRC which is ugly but works great (I tried TuneConnect but it kept crashing or not refreshing). What prompted this post was an enthusiastic comment by Christelle, earlier today, when we were listening to synchronized music loudly on both computers. Moving from room to room and having the music follow you is just great! And both Airfoil and Airfoil speakers have a Windows version. Two thumbs up!
One final note: I could not make Airfoil connect to Airfoil speakers initially, and even though I had not yet bought the product, the support at Rogue Amoeba was amazing: they answered very rapidly (on a Sunday) and we finally found out what was wrong (one computer had IPv6 turned off).
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I just checked this out — I think I want to get this. Is there really no delay in the synching?
There is no delay I can hear (and there is one spot where I can hear both computers). However there is a small delay, of about 3s, between the time iTunes (or whatever) starts playing and when the audio comes out. This I guess is for caching purposes.
Their trial is fairly nice: it's unrestricted, but after 10mn they add some noise to the sound. Restarting the program gets you another 10mn, so it's more than enough to test.
And for full disclosure: Rogue Amoeba was responsible for the current ssh problem after the latest security update. They reacted fairly fast and very openly, not trying to hide that hijacking audio streams of running applications require some hacking.