Did you get a new Airport Express for christmas? Would you like to jam to some Pandora on your Apple TV? Want to use your i-Pod touch or i-Phone for a speaker for your music collection? Airfoil is for you!

Airfoil takes your audio from your Mac or Pc and streams it to various devices on your network. Rogue Amoeba (developer of Airfoil) also has several applications that will allow your to turn your regular devices into speakers for Airfoil (Mac, Windows, Linux, IOS) as well as hardware devices such as the Apple TV and the Airport Express.

“Play any audio across your network to a whole host of devices, all in sync!”

Airfoil sends audio to remote speakers including iOS devices, other computers, and hardware devices like the Apple TV and AirPort Express. Airfoil for Mac gives you any audio, everywhere.” (From the Airfoil page)

What is great about this software is how it just works. To get started, download the software for Mac or PC from there website , install the software and you are ready to go. Available devices will show up in a list, here you can control what devices will receive the stream. You can choose single devices or all of them and your media will be streamed across the network in sync.

Audio:Airfoil works with several different audio services that are available online such as Pandora, Last.fm, and Spotify. The software also works with another “Rogue Amoeba” software title, Pulsar which pulls your XM and Sirius streams into a local application. The streaming does not stop on the web, any application that is on your computer that has sound can also be hijacked i.e. Quicktime, i-Tunes, and VLC. Another nice feature is the streaming of Metadata to IOS devices such as the Apple TV. Now you will have all of the information about the sound that is being played displayed on the device.

Video: Video at this time is not streamed to devices but the audio from devices is. There is a built in Airfoil Video Player that will play content and make sure that the audio stays in sync. You are also able to pull in the audio from sites like HULU and Netflix and play the sound through your Apple TV which in my case is connected to my surround sound system and the quality is not to bad. Airfoil also works with any Flash or Silverlight video so you can watch failblog in all of its glory and have great sound as well.

There are a few other utilities that I use in conjunction with Airfoil in order to enjoy different content and they are definitely worth a look:

Miro – is an application that brings together thousands of shows from all over the web. i.e. Hulu, Youtube.

PandoraJam – Pulls your Pandora stream into a local application on the Mac.

Perian – a free, open source QuickTimecomponent that adds native support for many popular video formats.
Remote (IOS) – Controls your i-Tunes from your IOS device such as the i-Pad, i-Pod Touch, i-Phone.

Hulu Desktop- Brings Hulu to yourdesktop for Windows and Mac.

If you have any other cool apps let us know!

Until Next Time

Carpe Noctum

I didn’t believe that it was legit, but my credit card has just been charged 11 cents. And I’m the proud owner of the complete collection of AOE 3.

http://www.gamesforwindows.com/en-US/Games/AgeofEmpiresIII/

Enjoy!

I know, I know, Who is going to have a wireless card even close to there data center? The answer, no one. But you may find yourself wanting to create, test, and verify VHD’s while on the road or away from the server. Hyper-V does not natively support using Wireless Cards as they are un-likely to be used in production environments, that said it is still possible.

There are three different types of virtual networks that we can utilize in Hyper-V .External which binds a physical interface to the connection to the machine can access a physical network. Internal which will create a Virtual network adapter that you use to communicate between the machines on the server and the physical machine itself. The final one which is Private which creates a network that only the machines that you select can communicate on the virtual network.

The connection type that we will be using is the “Internal” type of connection. Like I stated earlier this connection creates a network interface on the physical computer so it can communicate with the virtual machine.

Go into Hyper-V Virtual Network Manager and create a new network. We will call it STG.

Now go into “Network Connections” (Control Panel –> Network and Internet –> Network and Sharing Center –> Change Adapter Settings )

Select the virtual adapter that was created and the wireless adapter and right click “Add to Bridge” You will now see a Network bridge that displays both networks IE STG and DadderN (Home Network).

Now set the IP settings to your default gateway and other network settings.

Now you will have given outside network access to your virtual switch and you will be able to navigate outside of your lan.

If you have any problems feel free to email me at tj{at}smalltowngeeks{dot}net

TJ