[ANSWERED]Best way to make air play devices...minimal delay?

Hey everyone,

So I finally got AirFoil working with my old Airport Express devices, the REALLY old ones that look like a giant iPhone charger. They still seem to work for audio just only on Ethernet, can't get wifi to work even if I disable encryption. Anyway my problem is that I'm trying to make Indigo speak over them but there's so much delay that it isn't working. I tried the Announcer plugin but it seems even worse. The problem is that if I do an action with speech, even if I press test it takes forever to play. If I'm not on Airfoil, the speech comes out over my Mac within a second. When connected to the PC and 1 AirPlay device though, I press test, and it's a good 5 seconds of nothing, then you see in the Airfoil window the graph going up and down showing audio received, and THEN the speakers play it.

Where I'm having trouble also is with multiple speech. Like if I wanted the Announcer plugin to use a variable and say something like The current temperature is 57 degrees. I do:

Speak: The current temperature is (Delay by 0)
Speak: variableCurrentTemperature (Delay by 3 seconds)
Speak: degrees (Delay by 5 seconds)

Etc, but what happens is I'll hit execute, 5-7 seconds go by with nothing, and then all audio plays at the same time. I'll do it again, and this time it might be correct with the proper delays. Do it again and they overlap again. It seems like when you hit execute, it does the delayed actions from that moment, not from when the audio actually exits the speaker, and not from the time it starts to exit the speaker.

Should I start the first speech action with a delay of 10 seconds or something and then the second 13 seconds and last one 15 seconds type thing? It just seems so long as if I want it to speak when a door open or something, the person would be in the house for awhile before it even notifies me. Just hoping to get it working better as I just bought a Mac Mini to use as a server as all my other Mac's don't run the latest AirFoil, but so far it's been less than impressive. Thanks!

I too would love to know how to reduce the delay.

[jay (support)]

The delay is because the airplay protocol adds some measure of buffering when sending audio to other devices over the network (to help avoid stutters, etc). I believe Airfoil is a perhaps a even a little more conservative about the buffering. If you're broadcasting to multiple devices or if you're using System Audio as the source, then it will get even worse. If you're looking for immediate sound (along the lines of conversational speech) then it's not likely to work particularly well.

Thanks, too bad it doesn't work better. If I do just iTunes music over AirPlay, when I press play on the KPL or schedule/trigger it takes about 4 seconds to start. AirFoil is just awful, around 7-8 seconds before it happens. All I really wanted it for anyway though was iTunes to be able to change AirPlay devices so will see if maybe there's a way to do that myself without AirFoil. I find the quality of AirFoil not as good, as when I use iTunes the AirPlay devices are all perfectly in sync, good volume etc, but with AirFoil there's a tiny delay, and it makes them both really low in terms of volume even at max.

[jay (support)]

Odd - I just ran several tests and using Airfoil set to System Audio as input and streaming to two different speakers I'm consistently getting 3 seconds lag. I also rarely get the sound out of sync (like less than once a month) and most of the time Airfoil will rebuffer automatically.

You might want to contact Rogue Amoeba and tell them about it since your issues seem out of the norm.