Airfoil 5.13.0 Mac

With Transmitter set to capture a specific app, Airfoil lets you route a podcast player to a kitchen speaker while the rest of the Mac stays silent. That surgical control is what sets it apart from system-wide mirroring.

Send lossless audio to multiple speakers at independent volumes

• Sending audio to several devices at the same time, each at its own volume.
• Capturing audio from any single application without mixing in alerts or other noises.
• Transmitting in Apple Lossless, so quality doesn't take a hit over the air.

Needs macOS 14.4 and the free Satellite apps for remote control

• Requires macOS 14.4 or newer and a 64-bit Mac, either Intel or Apple Silicon.
• The interface is English-only.
• Remote control and receiving depend on the free Airfoil Satellite companion apps.

Rename generic speaker labels in the app right after setup

Give yourself ten minutes on day one to name your speakers properly. Airfoil picks up device names from the network, and a house full of "Living Room" and "Bedroom" entries gets confusing fast. Rename them in the app's speaker list by double-clicking any entry—call them something you'll recognise instantly, like "Kitchen HomePod" or "Garage Bluetooth."

Next, decide which source you'll use most often and set it as the default. The app remembers your last Transmitter choice, but if you nearly always send audio from Music or Safari, lock that in from the start. Click the Transmitter dropdown and pick your source. The equalizer settings also stick per device, so spend five minutes dialling in a gentle bass cut on smaller speakers that tend to rattle at higher volumes.

If you plan to stream to iOS devices or secondary Macs, install Airfoil Satellite on those machines the same day. A Mac running Satellite can act as a receiver, a remote control, or both, and pairing takes under a minute. Enable "Automatically connect to this computer" on each Satellite device if you want hand-off streaming without reaching for the host Mac every time.

One habit worth forming early: after a macOS update, launch Airfoil once before assuming it's broken. The audio capture components occasionally need reauthorisation, and the app will prompt you with clear instructions if that's the case. A quick trip to System Settings > Privacy & Security > Microphone sorts it out.

Patchy Wi-Fi on 2.4 GHz often causes Apple Lossless dropouts

Audio stutters or drops out. Apple Lossless encoding is light on the CPU but sensitive to patchy Wi-Fi. If a device keeps cutting out, move it closer to the router or switch it from a congested 2.4 GHz band to 5 GHz. Bluetooth speakers add their own latency; Airfoil's sync slider under the speaker settings can compensate for a lag of up to two seconds.

A specific app won't appear as a source. Airfoil hooks into the audio pipeline per application, and some software—particularly older media players or those with exclusive hardware output—refuses to share a stream. Launch the target app after Airfoil is already running, and if it still doesn't show, quit and reopen it. The Transmitter list refreshes whenever apps start or stop playing audio.

Apple TV or HomePod shows up but stays silent. Since version 5.13 restored streaming to those devices, the fix is often as simple as toggling the connection. Disconnect the speaker in Airfoil, wait five seconds, and reconnect. If that doesn't do it, restart the Apple TV or HomePod and check that both the Mac and the target device are on the same subnet.

Volume sliders are greyed out for certain speakers. Some AirPlay receivers handle volume locally and don't expose a remote control. Adjust the volume directly on the speaker or receiver instead.

Gatekeeper blocks the app after installation. The Terminal step during setup handles this, but if you skipped it or macOS later quarantines the helper components, running xattr -cr /Applications/Airfoil.app in Terminal and relaunching clears the block.

Workflow: sending a podcast to two rooms and a pair of headphones

Say you're catching up on a long podcast but need to move between rooms without missing a word. Here's how Airfoil handles it from start to finish.

1. Open your podcast app first—Overcast on the web, a desktop player, whatever you use—and start an episode. Confirm the audio is playing.
2. Launch Airfoil and set the Transmitter to that specific podcast application. The waveform display lights up, confirming it's capturing the stream.
3. In the speaker list, tick the HomePod in the living room, the Google Cast speaker in the study, and your Bluetooth headphones. Each gets its own volume fader.
4. Tap the equalizer button next to the headphones and roll off the highs slightly if the podcast voice feels sharp. Leave the room speakers flat.
5. As you walk from the living room to the study, mute the living room speaker with one click and unmute the study one. The headphones stay live the whole time, so there's no gap in audio.
6. When the podcast ends, stop playback in the podcast app. Airfoil keeps the connections warm for a few minutes, ready for the next episode without re-pairing anything.

This setup works because Airfoil treats each output independently. You're not mirroring a system stream and hoping for the best—you're routing exactly one app to exactly the speakers you choose, with per-device EQ and volume.

People search for an Airfoil torrent before realizing a trial exists

One of the first things people look for when they hear about Airfoil is whether an Airfoil torrent or Airfoil crack is their only option for trying it. The app has been around long enough that searches for Airfoil cracked Mac or Airfoil cracked pop up frequently, usually from users who want to test multi-room streaming before committing. What they find when they run the actual application, however, is that the setup doesn't rely on phone-home checks or online activation hurdles—it installs, it streams, and it works.

Another common question is whether Airfoil for mac requires an always-on internet connection. It doesn't. The streaming happens entirely over your local network; the Mac sends audio directly to the speakers, and no cloud service sits in the middle. If your router is up, Airfoil works, even if your broadband is down.

People also ask if they can leave their Mac asleep and still stream. The answer is no—the host Mac needs to be awake and running Airfoil. But the companion Satellite app on a secondary Mac can wake that machine from sleep when it receives a stream request, which softens the inconvenience for always-on desktop setups.

Finally, there's the question of latency. For music, it's a non-issue—Airfoil synchronises playback across AirPlay and Google Cast devices within a few milliseconds. For video, though, the delay is noticeable. If you're watching a film on the Mac and sending the audio to an AirPlay speaker, the picture will lead the sound by roughly half a second. That's a limitation of the transport, not a bug, and the developer recommends using system AirPlay mirroring for video instead.

Version 5.13, released September 25, 2026, restores audio streaming to Apple TV and HomePod devices.

• macOS 14.4 or later
• Intel or Apple Silicon Mac, 64-bit