airfoil

What This Skill Does

The Airfoil skill is an advanced automation tool for macOS that allows you to control your multi-room audio setup from the terminal or through natural language commands via OpenClaw. Airfoil is the industry standard for streaming audio from any application on your Mac to virtually any speaker, and this skill bridges the gap between the Airfoil GUI and programmatic control. With this tool, you can seamlessly connect to specific speakers, adjust volume levels on the fly, and manage your sound output without ever needing to navigate a mouse or click through nested menus. It is designed for power users who want to create automated audio "scenes"—such as instantly routing all audio to the living room when work ends or muting specific zones during a focus session.

Installation

1. Ensure you have the Airfoil application installed on your macOS system. You can install it via Homebrew by running brew install --cask airfoil or by downloading it directly from the Rogue Amoeba website.
2. Open Airfoil at least once to ensure all system permissions are granted. Navigate to System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility and ensure Airfoil is enabled. This is critical as the skill relies on AppleScript to interact with the Airfoil interface.
3. Install the skill directly into your agent environment using the command: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/asteinberger/airfoil.
4. Once installed, verify the connection by running ./airfoil.sh list to ensure the skill can correctly identify your network speakers.

Use Cases

• Whole-Home Audio: Trigger a single command to sync music across all supported speakers simultaneously.
• Focus Mode: Automatically mute specific speakers when starting a deep work session to minimize distractions.
• Home Theater Setup: Quickly switch audio routing between your office speakers and your living room television system.
• Scheduled Playback: Use cron jobs or recurring tasks to set speaker volumes at specific times of the day.

Example Prompts

• "Hey Claw, connect to the Sonos Move and set the volume to 40%."
• "Can you switch my audio output to the Living Room TV and mute the kitchen speaker?"
• "What is the current volume level of my connected speakers?"

Tips & Limitations

• Case Sensitivity: When referencing speaker names, ensure you use the exact string returned by the list command.
• Accessibility: If the skill fails to control a speaker, check that Airfoil is open and that the macOS Accessibility permissions are still active for the application.
• Dependencies: This skill only functions on macOS; it cannot control Airfoil instances running on Windows.