…five days after I complained because the Rogue Amoeba website was essentially an information vacuum (with no mention of its announced product upgrades, despite several links from external sites to forums that “are no longer online”).

Not only that, when I’d emailed them the chap who replied hadn’t heard of Airport Speakers. Well, Airport Speakers are now here, and they rock.

Apple’s Airport Express is a wifi base station that can plug into your hifi so you can send music from iTunes wirelessly. Airfoil let you send any audio from your computer over the the AEX. Now Airfoil 3 lets you send audio from your Mac to any other Mac running this little app called Airfoil Speakers. The Mac running the latter shows up in Airfoil along with any AEX units on your network. I have a Mac Mini but no AEX (I was going to buy one and plug in next to it just to get AirTunes. Airfoil just saved me £60). It’s a pity the Airfoil Speakers won’t show up in iTunes itself (this is apparently due to Apple’s encrypting the iTunes output) but it doesn’t really matter because you can easily use Airfoil instead.

Now Airfoil can also send the audio from your videos and DVDs to an AEX/Airfoil Speakers. Previously this was a problem because of the delay when sending audio (the video was out of sync). This is solved, now, by using the Airfoil video player which has, built in, just the right amount of delay. It’s a shame not to be able to use your video player of choice, but it’s not a bad little player. It urgently needs to support the Apple Remote (the only flaw I’ve found so far).

There’s a tour of the new Airfoil here. With the new features, it’s indubitably worth the $25, but you can download a trial to use it for up to 10 minutes a time.