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At work we use a Mac mini running Airfoil as an endpoint to stream music through the speakers.

Ideally, I'd like to query that machine to ascertain the name or address of the current client streaming media to it.

I'm happy to do this from another machine on the network, or from an agent on the Mac mini itself. Is this possible?

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Do you mean you're using Airfoil Speakers on the endpoint Mac mini? – binarybob Oct 1 '12 at 19:10
Yes, sorry if that wasn't clear. I'm reasonably tech savvy as a developer, but the layers and layers of magic and abstraction that underpins this is making it quite hard to diagnose describe. I believe that's the technology in question. – richo Oct 2 '12 at 6:00
Adding a link to the Airfoil software you are using may help others to better understand the context of your question. – patrix♦ Oct 6 '12 at 14:52
I'll see what I can find. We're using iTunes as the client in the office, to be honest I suspect that if the protocol isn't open enough that I can just make a query over bonjour what I'm after probably isn't achievable. – richo Oct 7 '12 at 0:24

1 Answer

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I appreciate this is not ideal, but when a remote client connects to Airfoil Speakers on my machine, I see a line similar to the following generated in the Console, coming from /var/log/appfirewall.log

Firewall[85]: Allow Airfoil Speakers connecting from 192.168.1.72:52013 to port 5000 proto=6

So potentially you could cat or tail the appfirewall.log looking for "Airfoil Speakers" using something like

cat /var/log/appfirewall.log | grep -i "airfoil speakers connecting"

and parse out the IP from the relevant lines.

Alternatively, I notice that Airfoil supports AppleScript so maybe there's something you could do with that. Or you could drop Rogue Ameoba an email, I've always found their support to be excellent.

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I might do just that. Thanks. I had a play with their AppleScript API and I suspect that I'm Doing It Wrong (tm). I'll have a look through the logs, hopefully it'll expose the data I need. thanks! – richo Oct 2 '12 at 15:04

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