As I wrote previously, Rogue Amoeba’s just-released iPhone app “Airfoil Speakers Touch” is a slightly baffling piece of software with limited use in practice. I don’t think much of the criticism it is getting on the iTunes App Store is their fault tho, and the upcoming 3.0 SDK features may let Rogue Amoeba finally create what users think this app will do (and what they really want — Airfoil for iPhone!). But, for now, it’s baffling.
As a composer embarking on scoring my first iPhone game, however, I now see a tremendous use for this. Our audio system has great studio speakers, but iPhone music has to be optimized for audibility over the tiny phone speaker as well. Instead of the laborious “export, mp3, copy to iTunes, sync, iPod play” routine, I can simply hijack Live or DP and beam the audio to my phone. Tweaks made on-the-fly are immediately heard.
A phone call will still interrupt the audio with no option to resume, and I still can’t control the host from within the app… but it did just make my workflow much simpler.
Although it may have limited use. I feel it does the job it is meant to do, broadcast audio from your computer to your iphone, touch, Airport Express and other computers … very well.
As a back yard party advocate this is exactly what I had been waiting for. I have a set of powered speakers with an external jack in the back yard. Now I can stream iTunes, Rhapsody (yuck), web radio stations, etc. etc. and still alow my friends to hook their source to the speakers if needed.
I would have to agree that they could add some features for known audio sources like iTunes (song name, FF, RW, etc.).
Keep up the great articles.