I bought a new speaker that indicates it supports Apple AirPlay. Cool. But how do I add it to my AirPlay options on my iPhone or other Apple gear?
There are two major ways that you can “beam” audio music from one device to another and as of this moment, it definitely seems that Google Chromecast has won the competition in terms of functionality and widespread adoption. However, Apple’s AirPlay is still a good alternative, particularly if you have an Apple TV device, which makes it really easy to push content from your iPhone, iPad or Mac product to your television.
There are also a handful of third party devices that have AirPlay support too – though interestingly even on the Apple AirPlay help page there’s no mention of third party anything – so let’s go through the process of setting up a third party speaker with AirPlay. In this instance, I’m working with the splendid Riva Festival audiophile speaker (watch my YouTube review of the Riva Festival!) and an iPhone X, but the process will be the same with other devices too.
To start, you’ll want to turn on the speaker that supports AirPlay and, while it’s in pairing mode, connect to it with the Wi-Fi on your device (in my case, my iPhone). It’ll look like this:
Notice that the iPhone has automatically recognized that the RivaFestival09AF6C supports AirPlay and is now showing “Set up new AirPlay speaker”. No surprise that’s what you want to tap to proceed (and don’t worry about the ugly speaker name, we’ll fix that as part of the process).
Here’s what you’ll see for the AirPlay Setup process:
Note that there are three steps involved: hooking up the speaker to your actual wireless network, changing the name as desired, and then adding an optional password so your neighbors don’t surprise you at 3am with some beamed music or horror movie soundtracks!!
For the first step, adding it to the correct Wi-Fi network, tap on “Show Other Networks…” and you can choose your own network out of the subsequent list:
In this instance, my preferred network is “Aerie” so that’s what I will choose…
When you move back to the main setup page, this is now what you should see:
Next step, let’s give that speaker a better name! Easily done by tapping on the current name on this screen.
You’ll then be able to fix it or rename it as you want. A lot of people name speakers based on the room they’re in too, btw. I’m going to stick with Riva Festival in this case. Once done, the setup is even closer to complete:
Last step is to add a password, which will then, finally, show a configuration screen like this:
Since odds are very low someone’s going to put any effort into hacking the password for this, I suggest that something really simple like “mymusic” is just fine. Ordinarily, though, use better passwords! 🙂
Done. That’s it. Now in programs that support AirPlay like “Music” your output options will include the new AirPlay speaker along with anything else on your network that has support:
Notice that the Apple TV shows up all by itself, of course, but there’s the Riva Festival, complete with nifty icon.
Pro Tip: While you’re checking out my tutorials on the Apple iPhone, don’t miss all the other iPhone help pages here on the site too. Thanks!