I’ve had a wireless headphone set for a couple of years, which I use to listen to TV late at night in our bedroom. The set has worked great but we recently rearranged some areas of our house and though I like the headset the charging base took up a lot of space on the mantel and its cables added to some additional clutter.

Rather than put the wireless set back in place I decided to go a different route and instead use a relatively-unused iPod touch as an Airplay speaker for the Apple TV in the bedroom.

Sadly, Apple doesn’t provide this capability in current devices though it has gone out of its way to prevent developers from being able to offer this feature via apps  At this time the only way I can use an iPod touch as an Airplay speaker is to jailbreak one.

This will work on several different devices but they must be jailbroken and they must also natively support Airplay (for example, a 1st gen iPod touch will not work). My wife still used her 4th gen iPod touch but only for music now that she has an iPhone. She agree to let me dump her music to our 1st gen iPod touch (which will work fine with her car accessory kit and it also has twice the storage of our 4th gen).

Unfortunately, the iPod touch is already running iOS 6.1.3. This is an issue because at this time there is not an untethered jailbreak available for 6.1.3. However, there is a tethered jailbreak. At first glance it may sound like an inconvenience but unless you actually need to restart the iPod touch (or if you have a habit of letting the battery die) this really isn’t that much of an issue.

To jailbreak our 4th gen iPod touch I used Sn0wbreeze in Windows. There’s an excellent guide over at Redmond Pie that details each step including some additional steps for iPhones.

One you have a jailbroken device I recommend using Cydia to install Airfloat. Airfloat is an app that can make a device function as an Airplay receiver. When I used it I was unable to have it stay connected to the Apple TV unless the app was open and the screen was not locked. I’m not sure if this is a limitation of the app or my iPod touch but in the end it wasn’t much of an issue anyway. The audio synced great with the video playing on the television. In the end, it works great as a wireless headphone configuration – one can use whatever headphones that will work with the iOS device.