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Don’t get me wrong, I love Apple. When they do things right, they really do things right. That doesn’t excuse them for being shortsighted, or perhaps more correctly, intentionally limiting, however. For example, the restriction users face from playing downloaded iTunes songs on anything but an iPod, or in the case of what prompted this post, the fact that only iTunes can stream to the Airport Express.

The Airport Express is a handy little device, though in the past I’m not quite sure it’s made up for how much it cost me. While I’ve used it to stream my mp3s to the living room, and even had my USB printer hooked up to it at one point, the Airport Express has simply been a novelty, or at least, only practical in a few situations. It’s not like I can’t just hook up a wire between my PowerBook and entertainment center for those rare situations that I have people coming over and I need to crank some beats. Maybe if I had a desktop Mac, the situation would be different, but like I said, the Airport Express has been a novelty for me, and not much more.

On a whim, I decided to look into whether there were any Airport Express hacks for streaming audio from software other than iTunes, and lo and behold, Rogue Amoeba came up with Airfoil. The software does exactly what I want: stream audio from any application to my Airport Express. The free demo adds noise to playback after 10 minutes of use, so I picked up the $25 dollar full version. Airfoil has a Windows version in addition to an OS X version, though they need to be purchased separately, which is a shame.

Airfoil is easy to use, and has a few preferences for tweaking what kinds of software should be displayed, EQ settings, etc. All in all, the package is nice, though a couple things annoy me - on first launch, I tried to send all of my system audio to my Airport Express. I was told I needed to install a plugin, which was easy enough to do, but then I needed to restart my computer. Similarly, choosing Safari to stream my Pandora stations prompted me to install a plugin if I didn’t want to close Safari and restart it. This plugin similarly installed with ease, but then required a user logout.

After installing both plugins and restarting my computer, I found that trying to send all of my system audio still prompted me to install the respective plugin, even though it was already installed. I’ll have to screw around with this some more later, but for now it’s not that important to me, since my primary purpose for Airfoil is to stream Pandora and Sirius internet radio to my Airport Express. Talk about getting more for my satellite radio money.

Sadly, Airflow’s functionality is something that Apple should have built into the Airport Express software. Oversight or intentional, at least Rogue Amoeba picked up the slack, making for what I will probably consider one of the top “shareware” apps for OS X.

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