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I have a stereo system hooked up to my Mac mini, but sometimes I'll play music from my laptop. Is there any way for the Mac mini to be recognized as a speaker and allow me to output sound to it (and the speakers connected to it) from my laptop without paid solutions like Airfoil?

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4 Answers

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This isn't free, but it's only $2.99 AirServer

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Thanks! i ended up finding this on my own, it works almost perfectly, although sometimes it has latency issues which cause echos – Jared Zimmerman May 19 '12 at 0:41
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Currently streaming from iTunes is only supported to Apple TV and Airport Express speakers. (Thanks @Jonathan)

You could try a pretty ugly hack of using home sharing to access your laptop music library from your Mac Mini and then control the playback by using vnc or some other remote desktop app to control playback on the Mini from the laptop.

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Only works with aTV – Jonathan. Jan 29 '11 at 0:13
@Jonathan Correct, I thought they had enabled this feature but didn't check. Answer amended, thanks. – conorgriffin Jan 29 '11 at 0:30
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Try Erica Sadun's AirPlayer. That might very well work. :)

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looks like it says on the page that it doesn't support music playback – Jared Zimmerman Jan 31 '11 at 18:14
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There is a free utility called shairport which acts as an airport express. If your computers are on the same network, you can use it to stream music between the two, as iTunes will see the computer it is running on as airplay speakers. I recently used it to stream music from my iPod to my computer.

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