Stream Soundcard Output With VLC (Free Airfoil Alternative)

October 8, 2009, 7:16 pm

VLC is a great simple program that allows you to play and stream pretty much anything. On this occasion I wanted to stream itunes through to my netbook that plays in the kitchen so I can play music controlled by the itunes remote on the ipod touch from my main office library.

The only application that did what I wanted is airfoil, but it didn’t work great for me and cost money to use. I figured there must be a way to achieve what I needed for free.

VLC to the rescue.

Here is how to stream the output of my soundcard (specifics may vary for you but the principle is the same) and open the stream using VLC:

Using the HTTP stream you can access the stream from anywhere in the world by connecting in to your IP address (you’ll need to sort out your router to do this though).

3 Comments »

  • Unfortunately that method wouldn’t be effective at streaming to an Airport Express. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

    Regardless, you’ve pointed out a cool feature in VLC I was unaware of.

    trees — November 14, 2009 @ 12:06 am | Comment

  • Or you can use SpeakerShare. Plase have a look: http://code.google.com/p/speakershare/

    Cenk Alti — January 4, 2010 @ 9:30 pm | Comment

  • This is great, thanks. I had the same problems with Airfoil in that it kept crashing. Do you have any thoughts on keeping the audio in sync?

    Sel — April 27, 2010 @ 6:15 pm | Comment

Comment

RSS feed for comments on this post.