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AirPhones turns your iPhone or touch into a wireless speaker

AirPhones is an interesting application for your iPhone or iPod touch that turns your mobile device into a set of wireless headphones. The idea is similar to Rogue Amoeba's Airfoil, but instead of routing audio from your Mac to an Airport Express, AirPhones sends your Mac's audio to your iPhone or touch connected to the same WiFi network.

For this to work you have to install the free Mac server application. It adds an additional output device to your Sound preferences pane. Once that's installed on your Mac you'll also need the mobile application (iTunes link) installed on your iPhone or iPod touch. After they're connected through the same network, your handheld should play your Mac's sound output.

This actually strikes me as a great idea. I spend a lot of time at my work desk listening to music through headphones and I inevitably get tangled up in the cord. My main concern, I suppose, would be running down my iPhone's battery, but that may be worth it to get rid of that cord.

AirPhone is $4.99 from the iTunes Store. You'll also need to download the server application from smashart. Unfortunately, the server app is Intel only, but they're promising both a Universal binary and a Windows version in the future.

[via 9 to 5 Mac]

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Audio iPhone iPod touch

AirPhones is an interesting application for your iPhone or iPod touch that turns your mobile device into a set of wireless headphones. The...
 

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TranceMist

But a set of A2DP capable bluetooth headphones can accomplish the same thing... albeit for a smaller distance.

February 28 2009 at 6:31 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Kyle

looks interesting but i think i'll wait for something from Rogue Amoeba. Here's hoping for "Airfoil touch" soon.

February 28 2009 at 12:17 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Steve

It works ok. But it's mono. It only streams the left channel.
Set the balance to the right in system preferences or in an app and you won't hear a thing. Why was my previous comment deleted?

February 28 2009 at 8:56 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to Steve's comment
Michael Rose

Wasn't deleted, it's right there.

February 28 2009 at 9:10 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Steve

Nevermind. Probably some akward caching problem with my browser.

February 28 2009 at 9:12 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
You are.

Unfortunately it's mono. It sends the left channel to both channels of your iPhone. If you adjust the balance to the right you won't hear anything.

February 28 2009 at 8:44 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Chane

I've been looking for an app like this for a while. Remotebuddy almost does it right but the interface is incredibly limiting.

Example: for playing your bedroom iMac's large music collection on your iPhone while you're out in the living room vacuuming with headphone attached...well the interface doesn't let you have access to your playlists. From what I remember while testing, I kind of had to go through a lot of menus in order to play one song at a time.

SimplifyMedia had a lot of potential for me, but it chokes on my hugh library of songs. If they would only let you limit the collection you're trying to connect to by letting you just sync to a playlist instead of your entire library then the app would be useful to me.

AirPhone sounds really promising for home use. Some times I want to pull up a quick playlist from my room and have it play in the living room when guest are visiting. I was about to set up my Wii to do this but AirPhones might work. The only downside is that it sound like it will mute the music in my bedroom too. It would be nice if I could connect my iPhone to my living room speakers and have the music playing in my bedroom And the living room by having my iPhone connected to the speakers out there while the iMac handles the bedroom.

While I could spend a bit to make this all work out better: Airphones sound like it might be a super affordable option. I'll probably get it as soon as they remove that "muting" the source (iTunes) issue.

February 27 2009 at 10:39 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
briancmccabe

Can I stream to both an Aiport Express and an iPod Touch at the same time?
If so, is there a difference in the latency?

February 27 2009 at 5:28 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
beemo

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February 27 2009 at 5:02 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Rick Stratton

I love SimplifyMedia and use it all the time, but comparing this app to SimplifyMedia is not comparing apples to apples (pardon the pun). SimplifyMedia is for sharing/streaming your music media. This app is for redirecting your macs audio output to your iPhone. This means that more than just your music media can be sent to your iPhone. Anything that you could send to your audio output can be sent to the iPhone with this app, such as a web presentation that has audio, etc. While I agree that, due to the lip sync issue, you probably wouldn't use it much for audio output of a video, which limits its usefulness, but maybe things like listening to a speech being streamed in a manner that cannot be directly received by the iPhone.

February 27 2009 at 4:09 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
spookysean

Odd - I am looking for the exact opposite - something that will allow me to listen to the music on my iphone over my Airport Express - or does that exist already?

February 27 2009 at 3:21 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Bagster

"I have larger than iPod capacity music laptop on my mac, I have my iPod sitting in my dock by my bed, connected to my main speaker system (which my mac isn't). I can now play any track from my mac - whether or not it is on my iPod and change tracks without moving from my desk."

Why don't you use simplify media?

February 27 2009 at 3:20 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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