Airfoil is a Mac utility from Rogue Amoeba that captures audio from any application and streams it wirelessly to speakers, AirPlay receivers, Bluetooth devices, Chromecasts, and other Macs or iOS devices running the companion Airfoil Satellite app.
What is Airfoil?
Airfoil is a system-level audio router for macOS that lets you break free from the assumption that sound must come out of one place at a time. Where Apple's built-in AirPlay routing is limited to system audio or a handful of blessed apps, Airfoil intercepts audio at the per-application level — meaning you can stream Spotify to the living room, route a podcast to your kitchen HomePod, and keep system alerts on your Mac's own speakers, all simultaneously.
The core workflow is refreshingly simple: pick a source (an app, a physical input, or system-wide audio), pick one or more targets, and drag a volume slider. Rogue Amoeba has been refining this interface for well over a decade, and it shows. Everything feels deliberate.
What does Airfoil do best?
Airfoil's standout strength is per-source, per-destination audio routing with real-time control — something no first-party macOS tool comes close to matching. You can capture the output of a single browser tab running YouTube, send it to three AirPlay 2 speakers in sync, and adjust each speaker's volume independently without touching the host app.
The latency compensation is genuinely impressive. When you stream to multiple targets with different buffer characteristics — say, an Apple TV and a Bluetooth speaker — Airfoil does the math to keep them in sync. Video fans will appreciate that Airfoil Speakers (the companion desktop app) can delay video playback on a secondary screen to match an audio stream, preventing the jaw-drop moment where sound arrives half a second ahead of the picture.
- Per-app capture: route any single application without touching other sounds
- Multi-room sync: stream to AirPlay, Bluetooth, Chromecast, and Airfoil Satellite simultaneously
- Volume control per output: independent levels for each destination
- Instant reconnect: targets remember their last volume; reconnection is one click
- Audio passthrough: low-latency local monitoring while streaming remotely
How much does Airfoil cost?
Airfoil is a paid app, available directly from Rogue Amoeba's website — it is not on the Mac App Store. There is a fully functional free trial; the only restriction is that audio transmissions are periodically interrupted by a brief noise burst, which is an honest way to let you evaluate the app without neutering it. Once you buy a licence, that version is yours to keep. Rogue Amoeba sells upgrades at a discount rather than switching to a subscription model, which I find refreshingly respectful of long-time customers.
The companion apps — Airfoil Satellite for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, and Airfoil Speakers for Mac — are free downloads that transform those devices into wireless speakers.
Who should use Airfoil?
If you have more than one room and more than one speaker system, Airfoil earns its keep immediately. I use it to push music from my Mac to a HomePod mini in the kitchen without surrendering whole-system audio routing to AirPlay. It is equally valuable for podcasters who want to monitor their recording input through studio monitors while streaming to a client, or for anyone who finds AirPlay's all-or-nothing system output mode too blunt an instrument.
Home-office power users who run multiple monitors with separate speaker systems, musicians routing DAW output to hardware, and anyone with a mixed AirPlay/Bluetooth/Chromecast speaker collection will all find something to love here. It is not the right tool if you only ever want audio to come out of one place — for that, macOS's built-in controls are perfectly adequate and Airfoil would be overkill.
What are the best Airfoil alternatives?
The most direct alternative is Apple's own AirPlay 2, which is free and deeply integrated — but it only routes system-wide audio, not per-app streams, and it cannot reach Bluetooth or Chromecast targets. For users who want a system-level audio mixer rather than routing, Loopback (also from Rogue Amoeba) is the complementary tool: it creates virtual audio devices for complex routing within the Mac itself. BlackHole is a free virtual audio driver that power users wire up manually to similar effect, but it lacks a GUI and requires significant command-line comfort.
For whole-home audio, Sonos has its own ecosystem that bypasses Mac routing entirely — an elegant solution if you are already invested in Sonos hardware, but a locked garden if you are not. Airfoil works with speakers you already own, which is its enduring advantage.
How does Airfoil compare to Apple AirPlay?
Apple's AirPlay routes the entire system output as a single stream; Airfoil routes individual apps as independent streams. That distinction matters enormously in practice. With native AirPlay, routing Spotify to your bedroom speaker also routes FaceTime audio, notification chimes, and every other sound — you get no fine-grained control. Airfoil gives you a separate stream per application, independent volume on each destination, and the ability to reach non-AirPlay targets like Bluetooth speakers and Chromecast devices. The trade-off is that Airfoil adds a small processing step, which introduces a few milliseconds of latency — imperceptible for music, noticeable if you are watching a video on the same Mac without using Airfoil's built-in video sync feature.
