How to Air Print to ANY printer from your iPod, iPad or iPhone

Apple has introduced a ‘print’ button onto iPads, iPhones and iPods to allow you to print directly to a printer from your iOS device. Unfortunately  you need a special AirPrint enabled printer. Thankfully there is a free application called ‘AirPrint Activator’ that allows you to print to any printer, here’s where to get it and how to use it.

AIRPRINT

On your iPhone at the bottom of some apps is a ‘share’ button. If you click this button you get a menu of different ways to share the content, one of these options is ‘print’ as shown below.

Share Button

Print Button

When you press the ‘Print’ button you will be given an option to choose a printer, but unless you have a special AirPrint printer’ you will see no printers here at all.  (I have a Canon IR5000, a Canon inkjet, a Xerox and a HP and none of them are AirPrint!)

If you don't have an AirPrint printer there will be no printer here to select

AIRPRINT ON NON-AIRPRINT PRINTERS

If you want your non-airprint printer to appear then you can download the following free application called ‘AirPrint Activator’ from netputing.

Click here to go to the netting page to find the latest  AirPrint Activator.

Click here to download version 2  directly.

This will download a little application called ‘AirPrint Activator’. You may need to click on the ‘downloads’ button in Safari to find it.

Click on the 'Show Downloads' button to find it.

Now run airPrint Activator by  double clicking the AirPrint Activator application. You should get a window that looks like the one below. Press the slider to ‘Turn On’ AirPrint.

In order for a printer to appear in AirPrint Activator you need to give people permission to print to it by sharing it. To do this go to System Preferences (Under the Apple Menu on the top left of your screen) and then Click on ‘Print & Scan’.

To find printer sharing click on 'Print & Scan'

In printer sharing preferences you need to select your printer on the left and then click the ‘Share this Printer’ box.

The final step - turn on Printer Sharing

The Printer should now appear in your iPad or iPhone printing menu!

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How to connect your iPhone or iPod to your home stereo.

To connect your iPhone, iPad or iPod to your home stereo you just need a 3.5mm to RCA cable like this cable here. The RCA cable plugs into the rear of your stereo and the 3.5mm plugs into your iPhone headphone jack.

When plugging into the back of the Stereo Amplifier, you can use almost whatever inout you want: CD-INPUT, TAPE-IN, TV-IN, DVD-IN or the AUX-IN,  but do not use the PHONO-IN as it is designed specifically for a record player and won’t sound as good.

For the best results set your iPhone volume to about half. If it’s too quiet you may get noise and hiss. If it’s too loud you may get some distortion.

You can have the USB charger plugged into the iPod at the same time.

If you want you can use an Apple iPod dock, and leave the audio and charger cable plugged into the dock permanently. The dock has a line out so that it doesn’t matter what volume the iPod is set to, and it will also charge your iPod, and has a remote control.

If you are buying a new Stereo, Pioneer and others are now including AIRPLAY into some of their amplifiers. The amplifiers have a Wi-Fi receiver built in which means you can play from your iOS device over your Wi-Fi (Airport) network directly to your Stereo with no loss of quality. You don’t need to connect any cables.

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