How-To: Stream music from iTunes to your iPod/iPhone

Today, I’ll be guiding you through a really cool trick you can do with your Mac & iTunes - Stream whatever’s playing to your iPod/iPhone.

First a few things you’ll need;
- Something to stream the audio with. I’ll be using Rogue Amoeba’s Nicecast app (For Mac OS X - $40, free unrestricted trial avaliable), however any program that lets you stream audio in MP3 format will work. (if you know any - share them in the comments)
- Nullriver’s Tuner for iPod/iPhone ($5 from iTunes), as Safari/QuickTime won’t play streaming audio on your iPhone
- A Wireless Network (if you havent got one already). An AdHoc one should work just fine.

Once you’ve got those two, hit the jump for full instructions.

First, install Nicecast on your Mac, and Tuner on your iPhone.
Open up Nicecast, and click the source tab.

If iTunes is not already selected, choose it from the dropdown, underneath the application box.

Next, choose the ‘Info’ tab, and fill out the boxes with whatever you want - Make sure you include *at least* the name.
We can ignore the Titles tab, as Nicecast will grab it from iTunes for us.
For the ‘Quality’ tab, you can play around and tweak it to your liking - I’m going to use the ‘High’ preset, as it’s a fair tradeoff between quality & CPU usage. Also, it’s not much point broadcasting at 192kbps, if all your music is encoded at 128kbps.
You can adjust the CPU Usage slider to whatever works for you - beware that if you set it too low, the stream may stutter/stop/pause etc.
Finally, the ‘Share’ tab.
From here, you just want the ‘Local’ address - write this down, you’ll need to enter it on your iPhone.
Once this is all set up, click ‘Start Broadcast’, in the main Nicecast window.
Open up iTunes, and start playing a song.
Go back to Nicecast, and you should see the ‘Current Track’ info, as well as the Audio Level moving (if not - check your iTunes volume.)

Grab your iPhone/iPod, make sure it’s on the same WiFi network as your Mac, and open up the Tuner app. Change to the ‘Genres’ tab, and tap ‘Open’ in the top left corner.

Here you’ll need to tap in the local address you wrote down earlier. Don’t worry about the ‘Title’ field, as it’ll grab the title you entered in Nicecast earlier. Then, tap ‘Done’.
If all worked correctly, you should see the title of your stream, the song that is currently playing, and the visualizer should be moving.

Notes:
- If you are using a demo version of Nicecast, you will have noise overlayed after broadcasting for twenty minutes. Quit & Relaunch Nicecast for clear music again.
- You can create playlists in iTunes and just have them play through if you dont want to keep selecting the songs in iTunes each song change.
- There is a couple of seconds delay between playing the song in iTunes, and actually listening to it on your iPhone. This cannot be helped, unfortunately.

If you have any questions, ideas, suggestions, etc, just leave a comment below.
Cheers!