Remote Audio Monitoring: Stream Your DAW Mix to Your Phone

By David Payette · audio engineer, professional musician · About →

What Remote Audio Monitoring Is

Remote audio monitoring is the ability to hear your DAW's output on a device that isn't your studio monitors — typically a phone or tablet, in real time, while you mix or record.

It's worth separating this from adjacent concepts that often get lumped together. Remote recording means capturing a performer in another location, with audio flowing back to your session. Remote collaboration tools like Source-Connect or Audiomovers SESSIONS route bi-directional audio between studios. Neither of those is what we're talking about here.

Remote audio monitoring is one direction: your mix bus flows out. You listen on a phone, tablet, or speaker in another room — or across the country — without interrupting your session. No bouncing, no exporting, no file transfers. What you hear in the headphones at your desk is what plays on the phone in your kitchen, your client's laptop, or your artist's in-ears across town.

When You'd Actually Use It

1. Checking translation on phone speakers

The classic use case. Consumer earbuds and phone speakers are where most listeners live. You need to know whether your low end survives the translation before you call the mix done. Streaming directly from your session — while it's still open, before any bounce — means you can make adjustments and re-check in seconds rather than bouncing, AirDropping, and loading a file.

2. Checking AirPods and Bluetooth playback

Bluetooth codecs and AirPods DSP color your audio in ways that studio monitors don't reveal. Streaming to your phone lets you audition the mix through any Bluetooth output device the phone supports — AirPods, earbuds, a car stereo — while staying in your DAW.

3. Reviewing in another room

Sometimes you need to hear how a mix sounds in a different acoustic environment — standing in a kitchen, sitting in a living room, or just moving away from near-field monitors to get perspective. Streaming over Wi-Fi lets you carry your phone to any room without breaking your session.

4. Sending to a remote client or A&R for live review

A&R reps, managers, and clients don't want to wait for a WeTransfer link. Streaming a work-in-progress mix directly from your session — while you're both on a call — lets them give feedback in context, before the mix is baked. This requires a relay connection over the internet; Auxfeed's Pro tier covers this scenario.

5. FOH engineer streaming a board mix to artist monitors

A front-of-house engineer can stream a reference mix from their console's recording feed to an artist's phone for in-ear monitoring during soundcheck or a broadcast delay, without running additional cable runs. Useful for broadcast situations and rehearsals where IEM infrastructure isn't set up.

How It Works Under the Hood

The DAW plugin sits on your mix bus and captures the audio stream in real time — the same audio going to your monitors. It encodes that stream using one of three codecs: PCM (bit-for-bit lossless), Opus (compressed, royalty-free, good to 48 kHz), or AAC (iOS only, uses Apple's AudioToolbox encoder). The encoded audio is packaged into binary WebSocket frames with a small header carrying sequence number, sample rate, and timestamp, then transmitted over the network. On the receiving end, the phone app decodes the frames and plays them through whatever output you've selected — speakers, headphones, or AirPlay. When both devices are on the same Wi-Fi network, the connection is peer-to-peer with no server in the middle. When you're connecting over the internet, frames are routed through a relay server that fans the stream out to connected receivers.

Latency Expectations

Latency varies by connection type and output method. Here's what to expect in practice:

The peer-to-peer Wi-Fi path is fast enough that the latency is not perceptible for monitoring purposes — your monitors and your phone will sound slightly offset if you're in the same room, but for checking translation or reviewing in another room it's a non-issue. The relay path introduces the kind of latency you'd feel on a long-distance phone call; useful for client review, not useful for a performer trying to track in time.

Free and Paid Options

Several tools solve this problem. Here's an honest summary:

If you need to check translation on your phone while you're still in the session, Auxfeed's free tier covers that. If you need to stream to a client over the internet, that's Pro.

Security

By default, an empty PIN means anyone on the same Wi-Fi network who knows your IP address can connect to the stream. For home studios or dedicated studio networks, this is fine. If you're on a shared or public Wi-Fi — a co-working space, a venue, a hotel — set a PIN in the plugin settings before you stream. The relay connection used in Auxfeed Pro is encrypted in transit.

AirPlay Support

The Auxfeed iOS app supports AirPlay output. Once the stream is playing on your iPhone or iPad, you can route audio to any AirPlay-compatible device: a HomePod, an Apple TV, a set of AirPlay speakers in the lounge. This is useful for room listening — walking around a space to hear how the low end carries — rather than real-time critical monitoring. AirPlay introduces roughly two seconds of buffer latency, which is inherent to the protocol and not something Auxfeed can reduce. For kitchen or couch listening while you work, that's irrelevant.

Wi-Fi Requirements

For peer-to-peer streaming, both the Mac (or PC running the plugin) and the phone need to be on the same Wi-Fi network. A few specifics:

• 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz both work. You don't need to force both devices onto the same band; standard router behavior handles it.
• Mesh networks work fine. Multi-AP setups like Eero or Google Nest Wi-Fi route traffic between nodes without issues.
• iPhone hotspot from the same Mac works if you need an isolated test network. Enable Personal Hotspot on the iPhone, connect the Mac to it via Wi-Fi, and the plugin will discover the phone on that network. Note that this routes traffic over the phone's cellular radio, which adds a small amount of latency compared to a router.
• For relay streaming (Pro), standard internet connectivity is all that's required on either end.

Per-DAW Setup Guides

The plugin installs as AU, VST3, and AAX and works in any host that supports those formats. Specific setup instructions — where to place the plugin in the signal chain, how to configure routing in each DAW — are covered in the per-DAW guides below:

• How to monitor Pro Tools on your phone
• How to monitor Logic Pro on your iPhone
• How to monitor Ableton Live on your phone
• How to monitor REAPER on your phone
• How to monitor Cubase on your phone
• How to monitor Studio One on your phone
• How to monitor FL Studio on your phone
• How to hear your Bitwig Studio mix on your phone

Frequently Asked Questions

Does this work over the internet, not just Wi-Fi?

Yes, with Auxfeed Pro. The free tier uses peer-to-peer Wi-Fi, which means both devices need to be on the same network. Pro adds access to Auxfeed's relay server, which routes the stream between any two devices over the internet. Latency is higher than Wi-Fi — typically 80–150 ms depending on where both parties are — but for client review and reference listening, that's not a meaningful constraint.

Will my DAW's CPU spike when I add the plugin?

In most sessions the CPU impact is negligible. The plugin runs on your mix bus, not on individual tracks, so there's one instance per session. PCM mode does no encoding and has the lowest CPU footprint. Opus encoding adds a small encode cost — on a modern Mac or PC, this is well under 1% of a CPU core. AAC encoding via AudioToolbox is hardware-accelerated on Apple Silicon Macs and is similarly lightweight.

What's the audio quality compared to LISTENTO?

At PCM settings, Auxfeed transmits bit-for-bit what your DAW is playing — no encoding artifacts, no compression, no introduced frequency shaping. LISTENTO's free trial uses a lower-bitrate codec and requires a subscription for higher quality. Auxfeed's free tier transmits full-resolution PCM or Opus at up to 48 kHz, 32-bit float, with no account required and no session time limit.

Does it work with AirPods latency?

AirPods in standard audio mode have lower latency than the roughly two-second AirPlay buffer, but Bluetooth latency varies by device and codec. Over a Wi-Fi peer-to-peer connection, the total end-to-end latency is typically 10–20 ms from the plugin's output to the phone's audio hardware. Bluetooth then adds its own latency — usually 20–80 ms depending on the codec your AirPods negotiate. The combined result is still fast enough for reference listening. AirPods Pro in Transparency mode add additional DSP; factor that in when evaluating translation rather than using it as your reference output for precision work.

Is it really free?

Yes. The core streaming functionality — PCM and Opus codecs, iOS and Android receivers, AU/VST3/AAX plugin, peer-to-peer Wi-Fi streaming — is free with no account required and no time limit. It is not a trial. Pro adds the relay for internet streaming and professional metering tools (integrated LUFS, true peak, LRA, mid/side monitoring, 3-band EQ, platform loudness targets). You can use Auxfeed in every session indefinitely without paying anything.

Download Auxfeed Free

The plugin installs on Mac and Windows. The receiver app is free on the App Store (iPhone and iPad) and Google Play (Android).

No account. No time limit.

• Download for Mac and Windows
• Get the iOS app
• Get the Android app