Audreio is an upcoming app that promises to let you stream audio wirelessly between iOS devices.
Using your existing router, Audreio streams audio from an Inter-App Audio (IAA) application on one device—or from the built-in mic—to another iOS device. The received audio can then be routed to the speaker or an IAA host.
The key question raised by Audreio is what sort of latency there will be with the wireless audio stream. They don’t provide specs, but do address it:
Wireless connections are moody and temperamental so we’ve worked hard to get the most out of them. At the heart of Audreio is a powerful engine with our proprietary streaming framework that minimizes latency while maximizing reliability.
No release date is mentioned at their site, but they say that Audreio is coming soon to the App Store.
Are you interested in wireless audio routing? Let us know in the comments!
via palmsounds
I’m highly dubious. Many proven developers have failed to get this working at a reasonable/usable quality. WIFI audio has been attempted by at least 3 developers, but that was just too jenky in modern cities with dozens of criss-crossing WIFI signals. Bluetooth and BTLE have since been explored by several others, but once again there is just no way to get any usable quality over the wireless protocol. This is why the new Mikme microphone doesn’t work in real-time. It has to buffer everything and will only stream/trickle out to its own app.
Their site is shady as shit too. It looks like they’re trying to claim they made just about every app out there. Click on the 9 squares in the upper right and you get taken to a page called /apps/ showing an assortment of apps they did not make… because as far as I know they’ve never made any.
Tim
Skepticism seems justified from the technical side, but not on the ‘shady’ side.
That page you mention is an index of apps that support Inter-App audio. They link to it from their page with the text ‘hundreds of available apps’. They should put a title at the top of their index, though, to make it more obvious what it is.
Their site does exactly what the AudioBus site does- show a bunch of icons of apps you might use with their product. I don’t have any comment on their app, but giving them hard time about their site is kind of silly…
In defense of Tim, there’s nothing on their /apps page that says ‘Apps that support Inter-App Audio’.
So, it’s not obvious what the point of it is, beyond putting a ton of affiliate links on their site.
The problem hasn’t been audio quality or bandwidth, it’s the underlying protocols, normal WIFI communications are ‘reliable’ and involve transmission and acknowledgement processes that always introduce much higher latency. If Audreio have spent the time sorting out a reliable unidirectional protocol perhaps with redundancy and error recovery I don’t see why this wouldn’t be possible. It’s poor logic to say that others have failed therefore it’s likely these guys probably will fail too and perhaps shows a poor understanding of technology and how it works and develops.
The inner city wifi signals interring with each other isn’t really accurate either, rather it’s interference from things like microwaves, baby monitors etc… that tend to cause problems, that combined with weather and people just not knowing how to set up their wifi network too – there’s a lot of them about but heck – talk to your neighbours – they _will_ thank you for making their internet faster 🙂
Anyway, there’s an increasing number of ‘wifi friendly’ devices being manufactured and developers of these devices are starting to talk about how this unregulated bandwidth is used, we’re going to see more cooperation like this for the benefit of everyone concerned i.e. much improved wifi!
Audio over wifi is already enjoyed by many at very high quality (Sonos, Slim), ultra-low latency audio over wifi is just a matter of time and probably ins’t that far away – maybe these guys have done it?
At best a very overpriced baby monitor is what it might provide.
Hi all, I’m part of Audreio’s dev team.
Thank you for all the feedback.
In response to the confusion regarding the page for browsing IAA compatible apps, we’ve updated the text in our main page, hopefully clarifying what it’s all about. Additionally, the title of the “apps” page clearly states that it is a “list of IAA compatible apps”.