Can't blanket AirPlay from iOS?

[Chew Toy McCoy]

I wanted to stream audio from my iPad to my Homepod but it wasn't from an app like Apple Music or YouTube. Those have in-app selection options to AirPlay. This app doesn't and I couldn't seem to find any setting that will let me AirPlay anything and everything I happen to have open on my iPad. I can do this connecting with Bluetooth, but not AirPlay? This seems like a massive downside if that is true, especially considering HomePods are AirPlay only.

This also makes me wonder why some stereo receivers have AirPlay when Blue Tooth accomplishes the exact same thing. What's the advantage?

 

[Cmaier]

I wanted to stream audio from my iPad to my Homepod but it wasn't from an app like Apple Music or YouTube. Those have in-app selection options to AirPlay. This app doesn't and I couldn't seem to find any setting that will let me AirPlay anything and everything I happen to have open on my iPad. I can do this connecting with Bluetooth, but not AirPlay? This seems like a massive downside if that is true, especially considering HomePods are AirPlay only.

This also makes me wonder why some stereo receivers have AirPlay when Blue Tooth accomplishes the exact same thing. What's the advantage?

You should be able to do it from the control center. Drag down from the top right of the screen.

You should see an icon on the top right-ish to airplay wherever you’d like.

 

[Chew Toy McCoy]

You should be able to do it from the control center. Drag down from the top right of the screen.

You should see an icon on the top right-ish to airplay wherever you’d like.

The top right corner has that function but it is tied to whatever the last streaming app I was using was. So if I was listening to a podcast it shows controls for the podcast app and I can choose AirPlay but it only AirPlays from the podcast app. If I go to a different app it doesn't play the audio through AirPlay.

 

[SuperMatt]

I wanted to stream audio from my iPad to my Homepod but it wasn't from an app like Apple Music or YouTube. Those have in-app selection options to AirPlay. This app doesn't and I couldn't seem to find any setting that will let me AirPlay anything and everything I happen to have open on my iPad. I can do this connecting with Bluetooth, but not AirPlay? This seems like a massive downside if that is true, especially considering HomePods are AirPlay only.

This also makes me wonder why some stereo receivers have AirPlay when Blue Tooth accomplishes the exact same thing. What's the advantage?

Airplay has more bandwidth. It can play higher-quality music using lossless compression. It has a longer range from the source to the speaker. Bluetooth uses a lossy compression algorithm and the speaker can’t be very far from the source.

 

[Chew Toy McCoy]

Airplay has more bandwidth. It can play higher-quality music using lossless compression. It has a longer range from the source to the speaker. Bluetooth uses a lossy compression algorithm and the speaker can’t be very far from the source.

But it's been my experience that in order to use AirPlay you also need to be connected to a wifi router with a reliable internet connection. How do I know? We have a cabin in bumfuck where we piggyback off our neighbor's crappy satellite internet. They're fine with that but I can't get AirPlay to do squat. I also tried the method of getting a wifi router not connected to the internet just to use for AirPlay and that didn't work either. Everything I was trying to stream was downloaded on my iPhone so it shouldn't need to connect to the internet for anything.

 

[Nycturne]

But it's been my experience that in order to use AirPlay you also need to be connected to a wifi router with a reliable internet connection. How do I know? We have a cabin in bumfuck where we piggyback off our neighbor's crappy satellite internet. They're fine with that but I can't get AirPlay to do squat. I also tried the method of getting a wifi router not connected to the internet just to use for AirPlay and that didn't work either. Everything I was trying to stream was downloaded on my iPhone so it shouldn't need to connect to the internet for anything.

It shouldn’t need to connect to the internet for AirPlay, no. AirPlay is a local protocol that uses Bonjour for device discovery over a LAN. But using WiFi is how it gets the bandwidth to handle video and lossless audio.

Bluetooth is meant for very low power use, and so it’s bandwidth limited. The default audio codec for Bluetooth is not great, AptX support isn’t super consistent (and Apple unfortunately is one of the hold outs) and AAC support over Bluetooth is even less consistent (but supported by Apple).

As for why a wifi router that wasn’t connected to the internet didn’t work, I can’t really say. Too many variables involved to diagnose from a single sentence. But generally that will work so long as all devices can get an IP address from the router and don’t have their own logic that requires an internet connection to fully boot. But that last bit is really down to the device having bad behavior, not AirPlay itself.