It's Okay!

An even simpler answer existed in the pesky dialog box asking me to restart Safari had I only read the fine print.  Rogue Amoeba clearly anticipated my need and shipped the solution with Airfoil: Instant Hijack.  It can be installed from the dialog box or the Install Extras… menu option within Airfoil.  After a system restart I was good to go.

Instant Hijack is certainly simpler than Fluid but I wanted to make sure I gave credit to the Rogue Amoeba gang for putting out a solid product which had the answer built right in.  However, the Fluid approach certainly wasn’t difficult and I’m glad I know about it now.

Some readers who aren’t Airfoil users may recall hearing about Instant Hijack before.  When Apple released Security Update 2008-002 some people had issues with ssh no longer working which was tied back to Instant Hijack.  Of course the Rogue Amoeba guys had an immediate fix.  You can read more about exactly what happened on their blog.

At least until I settled down to work and was looking for a little background noise.  I’ve always had a stereo or my Griffin radio Shark near by so I can listen to WXRT.  

Unlike so many of the radio stations out there which recycle the same 20 songs, WXRT plays a wide variety of songs.  The station also puts out a great CD each year called ONXRT: Live from the Archives.  The disc is always full of great live performances artists record for the station or at local shows and all of the proceeds go to worthy charities.  Picking up this year’s Volume 11 (which ironically looks like a deep dish pizza) was one of top errands to run on my recent trip back to Chicago.

When I left Chicago one of the first things I checked was if XRT had dumped the old AOL, Windows-only stream and luckily they had.  So for a while I listened on the tinny speakers of my MacBook Pro but eventually felt the need to feel the bass without having the length of the aux cable to my stereo limiting where I could sit and work in the apartment.  Enter one of my favorite indie Mac dev shops, Rogue Amoeba and their product Airfoil.

Airfoil lets you send any audio stream to an Airport Express so you can fully enjoy your wireless freedom. Almost…

The frustrating thing was the WXRT player is essentially a Safari window.  For Airfoil to work it often needs the application whose audio you’re hijacking and re-routing to the Airport Express to be restarted.  Restarting almost any application but Safari or NetNewsWire is feasible for me.  But like others, I use my browser tabs to keep track of a lot I have going on.  So I’d tend to listen to the same old Wilco and Smashing Pumpkins from iTunes rather than opting to restart Safari.

That is until I discovered Fluid and made my own site specific browser.  It was silly easy to create WXRT.app using Fluid and now I can listen to WXRT without disturbing all those browser tabs.  Until Google Chrome is released for OS X I can get some of the benefits by using Fluid.

WXRT.app (and quite possibly the first time I've found the Finder CoverFlow mode useful)