Power up AirPlay on Mac

Go beyond AirPlay to stream any individual Mac app’s audio

One of the biggest benefits of Apple’s ecosystem is the built-in ability to stream music to speakers on your local network. AirPlay enables you to send your Mac’s audio output to an AirPlay-compatible device. This can be an Apple TV, whether the latest version or the third-generation model; an AirPort Express router, which includes a 3.5mm mini-jack that can output an optical or analog signal; or various third-party AirPlay-compatible devices costing from about $30 up to several hundred for high-quality speakers.

The drawback is that selecting an AirPlay receiver in your Mac’s Sound preferences (or by Alt-clicking the speaker icon in the menu bar) results in all sound from your computer being sent to the receiver. That’s fine if you’re just running Spotify, but start a YouTube video and its sound will be beamed as well.

If you’re using AirPlay to stream audio from a background app on an iOS device and you start to play a video in another app, the former’s sound will cut out and the video’s audio component is sent instead. Sadly, there’s no way to overcome this limitation on iOS.

You get slightly more control in iTunes for Mac, because only sound from that app will be broadcast, and you can send it to multiple AirPlay receivers. You can use this to build a multiroom sound system around your Mac. If you want to beam music from another app in isolation, though, you can come unstuck. It’s here that Airfoil ($29, free trial available

rogueamoeba.com) comes in useful. This software enables you to choose an app that’s running on your Mac and send its audio – and nothing else – to any AirPlay speaker on your network. It can even send audio to multiple receivers at once, and the recently released Airfoil 5 lets you create groups of speakers for easy selection. Here, we’ll show you how to use Airfoil and its iOS counterpart app.