Ben Butterworth

Why?

You might want to play music or sounds running on Android phone on your macOS instead because your ears deserve better. In my case, I want to listen to the instructor playing on an Android app (Fiit) on my speakers. Romain Vimont, an inventor of popular and useful software is a hero once again, by making sndcpy.

• Your Android device doesn't have an Audio jack...
• Your speakers aren't bluetooth...
• You don't want to use your headphones.
  • I do not want to sweat onto my headphones, or
  • I want to share my music with others.
• Your macOS is connected via AUX cable (or USB-C/HDMI) to speakers, so let's use them.

Pre-requisites

• Command line experience, or just being resourceful.
• adb installed and usable. To install, run brew install android-platform-tools
• VLC installed in your /Applications folder: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/
• Open Terminal.app (already installed at /Applications/Utilities.Terminal.app) or iterm2

Installation steps

• Download the sndcpy APK and script from rom1v/sndcpy on GitHub, and place them in /usr/local/bin

  • Unzip the file downloaded from Github and move them using sudo mv -t /usr/local/bin ~/Downloads/sndcpy/sndcpy ~/Downloads/sndcpy/sndcpy.apk
  • This APK is installed to your android device whenever you run sndcpy

• Create a script called vlc in /usr/local/bin by running sudo vim /usr/local/bin/vlc, and passing the following content:

  • 1/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -I rc "$@"

  • The reason we put it in /usr/local/bin is that your mac will instantly be able to use it like a command, by calling vlc (once you restart the shell 🐚).

  • Optional: Confirm the file contains those contents, by running cat /usr/local/bin/vlc

• Make the file executable to you and the group: sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/vlc

• Add the following to your ~/.zshrc so that sndcpy can get the APK whenever it wants to install it onto your device:

  • 1export SNDCPY_APK=/usr/local/bin/sndcpy.apk

• Restart your shell, or reload that file: source ~/.zshrc

Usage steps

• Connect android device to computer (or attach it remotely via adb)
• Run sndcpy in terminal