Stream Pandora to your home stereo using Airport Express

As a long time advocate of Pandora there is possibly no need to expand upon my love of their discovery system. I’ve discovered more “new” bands with Pandora than any other music service out there. But I was always annoyed that I was limited to using built in PC system speakers or headphones to listen, while my default install of iTunes could stream all my iTunes music, including web radio stations, directly to my home stereo using my Airport Express.

Today I decided to do something about this situation and found a nifty piece of software that does the trick. Airfoil is available from RogueAmoeba in both Mac and Windows flavors and I had the demo software installed in less than 2 minutes and was streaming Pandora to my stereo in 3 minutes. This is not free software, but the $25 US price tag seems reasonable for the outcome. An additional upside is that Airfoil not only streams Pandora, but it streams audio from any web-page embedded audio player as well as standalone players such as RealAudio, Quicktime and many other applications.

Q: Can I stream music from Pandora to my home stereo using Airport Express?
A: Yes you can stream Pandora through Airport Express.

It should be noted that if you prefer to go with hardware for the same solution, you can do so with Squeezebox, and it’s also a solid solution, but I felt no need to buy another box (especially at $299 US) that would sit in the limited space of my audio cabinet.

Let me know if you find any other great uses for Airfoil…

——– edit 8/21/08
As an alternative to Airfoil a friend just pointed me to another really cool Pandora app that runs native on the Mac. PandoraJam has a ton of features that make the fact that it helps stream music to your home stereo almost a side-note. I suspect this would be a lot of fun to play with.

Filed under Internet Audio |