Posted November 26th, 2007 @ 04:57pm by Erik J. Barzeski
The thought occurs to me that the device I first talked about in January has come about in terms of hardware: it's an iPhone (or an iPod Touch). ((Yeah yeah, it's a little bigger than an iPod Shuffle-sized version, which I still think would sell (a Shuffle with WiFi, that is), but that's okay.))
It's just missing the software.
I wonder if software of this variety will be possible as of February…
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Posted 27 Nov 2007 at 11:42am #
There's already software for the iPhone that allows it to transmit items from your on-phone library to an Airtunes receiver. The other way around isn't yet cryptographically possible unless Apple releases it.
For whatever reason, the Airtunes protocol uses different keys when it sends or receives music. The keys necessary to transmit music to Airtunes have been reversed and released publicly. As far as I've seen, the keys to receive music streamed from the latest version of iTunes have not yet been reversed.
Posted 26 Dec 2007 at 7:34pm #
Have you had any luck with this yet? I just got an iPod Touch, and one of my first thoughts was that it would be incredibly cool to be able to use it as a source for my Airport Express.
If it's not currently possible, I think I'll have to see what I can get working - I know that Airfoil is able to transmit arbitrary audio to an Airport, so it should just be a case of doing some research and finding out how they're doing it.
Jon
Posted 27 Dec 2007 at 3:08pm #
[quote comment="44612"]There's already software for the iPhone that allows it to transmit items from your on-phone library to an Airtunes receiver.[/quote]
Where?! To me thats the more useful way round - and its certainly feasible as a 3rd party app (as airfoil and the works of DVD Jon show) but I haven't come across an ARM compiled version or any app that runs on an iPhone/iPod Touch (I presume it'd have to be a terminal app to begin with?)
Posted 27 Dec 2007 at 5:40pm #
JP - I'm not convinced there actually is any software to do this from an iPhone. Airfoil will do it on a desktop Mac, but I've not found anything from MobileMacOS.
It looks like I'll have to work it out myself, and I've registered a Google code project to keep track of things. No code yet, but I'll try to get something working over the weekend. http://code.google.com/p/airpod/
Posted 27 Dec 2007 at 7:30pm #
I wait with baited breath! Student or not I'd happily buy/donate for such an app (and there are no doubt hundreds more that would too)
I imagine you'd have to write a new app, rather than attempting to modify mobilemusicplayer, mind you, if it stores music data in a format similar to iTunes it can't be hard to grab the tracks, cross compile something like DVD Jon's Justeport and build a menu... hmmm, maybe it might be a little tricky 😛
Good luck!
Posted 08 May 2008 at 9:07am #
still no app to stream from iphone grrrrrr
Posted 22 Jun 2008 at 9:56am #
i would buy an iphone for this very reason if this feature was supported
Posted 11 Jul 2008 at 7:33am #
It looks like Apple have (kind of) sorted this out.
You can't stream from your iPhone/iPod straight to Airtunes, but the latest firmware release does include the Remote application, which will allow you to use your iPhone to control an iTunes library (or AppleTV), and crucially includes the ability to choose which speakers your sending the music to.
I'm now just waiting for the chance to try it out in the living room, streaming from my machine upstairs.
Posted 10 Nov 2008 at 4:02am #
This should include the ability for iphone/ipod to act as remote speakers, this would truly be cool..., i wouldn't be tethered to my desk to play my music.
Posted 21 Nov 2008 at 2:50pm #
if you want to stream from your computer to your iphone, use simplify media. It will work for computers on the same network or over the internet. That being said, I would pay for a app that would stream from my iphone to airtunes. I sync with my computer at work and have airtunes at home.
Posted 30 Nov 2008 at 9:43pm #
I still can't find any app to stream the audio output from your ipod/iphone. So far all I've found are some bluetooth dongles to connect the iphone to speakers wirelessly via bluetooth.
Posted 11 Mar 2009 at 7:15pm #
A lot of commenters seem to be mis-reading the intent of this post. Erick, I believe, wants to be able to stream music from his computer’s iTunes to his iPod Touch/iPhone just as if it were a speaker with AirTunes.
Additional usecase is when you have an iPod doc with an iPod Touch or iPhone in it and you want to be able to stream music to it from your computer (e.g. iTunes).
SimplifyMedia have an iPod/iPhone app which lets you stream music from your iTunes media library over WiFi or 3G. This can double as a (poor) replacement for AirTunes, as it must still be controlled from the device, not the computer. It actually supports playlists, so creating a playlist on your computer and then playing it via SimplifyMedia is a decent approximation of approximation of AirTunes IMO. (I don’t know what happens if you change the playlist while it is playing, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.)
Posted 24 Jun 2009 at 9:14am #
Airfoil supports using your iPhone / iPod touch as a AirTunes speaker.
Posted 12 Jul 2009 at 1:22pm #
Yeah, AirFoil is already in the App Store, and I've successfully sent music from my PC and my Mac laptop to my iPod Touch. That's not very exciting or useful for me, though.
I really want it the other way around. I want to play the music that's on my iPod on the Airtunes boxes around my house. That would be awesome, and it's weird that Apple hasn't made it happen after two years of people talking about this online. I don't want to have a PC sitting somewhere that needs to be on to make that happen with their Remote app, since that's just not reasonable in my setup.
Posted 10 Sep 2009 at 1:11am #
Airfoil maker has stated that this feature is not coming from their side. Apple has to make it happen
http://www.rogueamoeba.com/utm/2008/12/12/thoughts-on-airfoil-for-iphone/
Yes I would really love to be able to airtune from iphone to airport express, cutting out the need for a pc or mac.
Posted 01 Oct 2010 at 6:28pm #
Since Simplify has shut down, I started using Kalidity. It has really good support for iOS devices and you don't have to download an app. http://www.kalidity.com
I always seem to have issues with other alternatives. Either they are clunky, are bad at making playlists, or the phone app has problems... Also most of them don't even let you stream in a browser.