Friday, December 30, 2011

Streaming audio wirelessly around the home

My Sonos wireless music system is one of the best gadgety things I've bought in recent years.
Now I have 4 rooms around the house where I can stream my choons.

As I listen to a lot of radio — like TV programmes, I can't always be there to listen to it at the time. As a soul music nut, it's a great source of getting new choons to stream over Spotify, Last FM or iTunes on the Sonos.

First off, I got curious around Airplay over Sonos.  I thought this would  be good to throw audio from my iOS device to the Sonos rooms without the needs for buying extra Sonos gear.  The Airport Express wired to a Sonos Play:5 solution works pretty well.  It is prone to irregular sound drops from time to time.  I think this is related to the number of hops the connection has to make over the main home wifi and the Sonos mesh.  Tip of the day — Connect the Airport Express to the Sonos zone you will mainly use for more consistent connected performance.

Going back to the radio thing.  I use some cool software on my Mac by Rogue Ameoba. I use Radioshift for Mac to schedule recordings of shows I like to playback later. Mainly Solar Radio. (Note that Radioshift is no longer available).  I then use the Fission app to open the MP4 file of the show I recorded and edit out tracks I want to keep. Then export to iTunes to sync with the iOS device or be part of the Sonos connected music iTunes library (which is all stored on my NAS drive anyway).

An article appeared on Ars Technica, extolling the virtues of Rogue Ameoba's other product for streaming audio wirelessly around the home - Airfoil.  This was the piece I was looking for (instead of wiring in a 3.5mm stereo between the Mac and my Sonos Play:5). When playing back the audio from Radioshift, Fission or any other audio touting app on the Mac, Airfoil connects it to the Sonos Zones via the Airplay connected Apple Express.

Again, reliability is not 100% as any wireless activity on the home network seems to cause problems with the quality of the streaming. Probably a clash of packets. I do get tempted by the wired connection from time to time.

So in essence, if you have a Sonos system:

  • Airplay is worth exploring via a connected Airport Express to a Sonos Play:5. It's great to throw audio  from any iOS connected device to the one or more Sonos zones. Nice for parties :)
  • If you have audio stuck on your Mac (or Windows if you have to), Airfoil is a nice complement to getting Mac audio streamed around the home.

Worth it?  IMO yes, each of the products mentioned are relatively inexpensive and are well designed and easy to use.  And I'm sure I'll find other useful ways of using this as I tinker with it.

Of course you can see that Airfoil is a temporary solution, as Apple are likely to be baking in this functionality in a future release of OSX.

1 comment:

  1. Wow thats really amazing I have heard a new app clean music on spotify this app is great and I have started looking at it.Thanks for the help and suggesting the matter I will go forward with it.Keep publishing and writing new article.

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