Apple Airplay on Raspberry Pi in 7 Easy Steps

At the risk of being a bit off topic … A lot of people interested in Airplay will be looking at this post wondering how to use AirPlay with UPnP or ChromeCast devices. shairport-sync [1] (used in the article) only works directly with audio hardware, so won&#x27;t work with Chromecast or UPnP compatible systems. I&#x27;ve tried many many different open-source bridges and finally found AirConnect [2] which is by far the most reliable, active and well-maintained bridge. philippe44 responds to every issue filed (as far as I can tell). Works great with my Sonos PLAY:1 &amp; XBox.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mikebrady&#x2F;shairport-sync" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mikebrady&#x2F;shairport-sync</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;philippe44&#x2F;AirConnect" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;philippe44&#x2F;AirConnect</a>

My beef with airplay and pretty much every other Zeroconf based service is that they require weird stuff to work across subnets. Here I isolate every “IOT” device specially the ones that potentially has a phone home capability into a separate network. The wireless network is also segregated and routed. To make everything Zeroconf&#x2F;Bonjour work I have to create lots of SRV, PTR and TXT records in my internal DNS which is a Samba4 AD. This document <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.grouplogic.com&#x2F;Knowledge&#x2F;PDFUpload&#x2F;Info&#x2F;WanBonjour_1.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.grouplogic.com&#x2F;Knowledge&#x2F;PDFUpload&#x2F;Info&#x2F;WanBonjou...</a> is great to setup the basics but you will have to find out the specific RR for each type of service.

This guy must have been doing this at exactly the same time as me. I used shairport-sync and whilst I eventually got it working last week it wasn&#x27;t plain sailing. Getting the service setup to start upon powerup was a real pain in the ass. I&#x27;ve also had to move it onto a separate wifi network as an RPi camera was hogging the bandwidth which caused audio dropouts on the shairplay-sync server.<p>Also as many of you will probably comment, the Rpi audio out stage is awful. I&#x27;m waiting for my Dad to return my USB soundcard so I can use that instead of the headphone socket on the Pi.

I&#x27;ve been doing this for a couple years with a Zero (pre-W) and a pHAT DAC[0] with great success.<p>It just runs and reliably shows me a Airplay device for my garage speakers. I recommend it for people who have audio hardware lying around and don&#x27;t want to replace it with more expensive and worse sounding smart speakers.<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;shop.pimoroni.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;phat-dac" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;shop.pimoroni.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;phat-dac</a>

It&#x27;s a bit funny how the best way to stream audio between two Linux boxes is Airplay with shairport on the server and the raop2 PulseAudio Plugin on the Client. It integrates well into the Desktop too and is automatically discovered!<p>It&#x27;s funny because PulseAudio could do network streaming itself, but as it still streams the uncompressed PCM stream afaik, it&#x27;s pretty useless in practice.

You can also just buy an old Airport Express base station and repurpose it for AirPlay. The old 802.11g ones can be found for about $10 or so and even have an optical audio out.

All the Airplay tutorials I&#x27;ve seen are about being a receiver for Airplay signals from something like an iPhone. These boxes then plug into speakers for output.<p>Does anyone know if there are tutorials on making an Airplay client that instead sends audio &amp; video to a receiver of some type (e.g. Apple TV)?

My understanding is that this is possible because at some point, the private keys for the airplay encryption were found. Alas airplay 2 cannot be supported unless the same thing happens, which is a shame.

If you want to do the same for Chromecast it&#x27;s not possible yet. Google seems to have locked down their API. There is some open-source projects that are trying to reverse engineer it but the problem seems to be linked to crypto keys used to authenticate real Chromecast devices: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;thibauts&#x2F;node-castv2&#x2F;issues&#x2F;2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;thibauts&#x2F;node-castv2&#x2F;issues&#x2F;2</a>

The Raspberry Pi has awful noisy audio out. There are some nice Amps you can get like the HiFi Berry. I set up a nice arrangement in my old lab with with these.

Been running Shairport Sync on a Pi3 for the last couple of years. It works great.<p>I&#x27;ve been adding more stuff to the Pi over time, so it&#x27;s now a Plex server, Home Assistant hub, Torrent box, Pi-hole and more.

I did the same thing a couple of weeks ago using a Raspberry Pi 3 B+. I have it connected to a Cambridge Audio stereo amplifier through USB, since the amplifier has an integrated DAC. I&#x27;m very pleased with it, and it was surprisingly easy to get working.

Mike Brady has done a great job with this. The project also has a very detailed readme, far beyond what most provide. Thanks Mike for all your efforts.<p>I&#x27;m not sure this how-to article adds that much but I guess it&#x27;s nice and simple looking.

Did the opposite a few months ago, and used a Raspberry Pi Zero to AirPlay audio from my turntable to a HomePod. It was about as amazingly useless as one would imagine, but fun none the less.

Pi MusicBox?<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pimusicbox.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pimusicbox.com&#x2F;</a>

If anyone is looking for multi room audio (like airplay 2), using raspberry pies, this is the best solution I’ve seen - it is really impressive:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;homebridge&#x2F;comments&#x2F;8v3qb0&#x2F;shairport_sync_and_airplay_2_any_hope&#x2F;e686gk1&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;homebridge&#x2F;comments&#x2F;8v3qb0&#x2F;shairpor...</a><p>If people have other suggestions for multi room audio I’d love to see them.

It&#x27;s overkill to use a Raspberry Pi for this.<p>I made a dozen Airport adapters with the TP-Link WR710N which was $25 at the time and connects to Wifi or ethernet. Add a USB soundcard ($10?) for powered speakers or a Topping USB amp ($75?) for unpowered speakers. Install OpenWRT, connect it to your network in client or bridge mode, install the built-in shairport-sync package, and go.<p>Not sure what has replaced the WR710N but I&#x27;m sure you can still do this just as cheaply.

I love a good excuse to buy more RPis and have thought about doing something like this.<p>However, I already have a cheap bluetooth dongle that I plugged my stereo to via P2. Is there some advantage to this setup (beyond range)?<p>What I&#x27;m really considering is a web interface, with search, playlist etc and a huge SDcard with all my music connected to a RPi. Currently all my music is on my Mac and Apple Music Home Share is a bit flaky&#x2F;slow at times.

My take on this was :<p>1- Buy hardware (Raspberry + DAC + Amplifier)<p>2- Download and install Volumio (volumio.org) on SD card<p>3- Profit

Nice! I&#x27;m trying to do it the other way around, record player into Raspberry Pi, broadcast to my HomePod. Unfortunately the only way it works is to add a laptop in between. If anyone has managed to get an AirPlay broadcast from Linux I&#x27;d love to know how you did it!

I bought a Google Chromecast Audio. Spotify, Soundcloud and Pocket Casts support it on iOS. I&#x27;m not actually sure what the officially Apple sanctioned way of getting audio to my speakers is, but I haven&#x27;t felt the need to find out either.

I use shairport-sync on my iMac to stream Overcast from the iPhone. There is a huge latency and the connection drops out every once in a while. This should have been a built in feature.

While not an iOS user, it is definitely cool how many one off projects you can create using Raspberry Pi. I do wish some of the full kits (case, power adapter, micro sd) would come down in pricing slightly as it tends to bump up towards more powerful, but less supported (and more difficult) options when you consider the full system price.

This is a cool project, and I think it can be a good addition to an existing home media server.<p>For the use-case they describe however (wiring up an existing home stereo) it would probably be a lot easier and better supported to just buy an Airport Express.<p>You can still buy them online for ~100, and they support Airplay2 as well, which is much nicer for multi-room audio.

It appears this is Airplay 1 only (please correct me if I&#x27;m wrong) so this will not be as nice as say, using an Airport Express but if you had this stuff laying around it might be worth it.

For those using Spotify premium for listening to music there are some open source projects (like spotifyd) that replace the now deprecated spotify-connect.

Does anyone have suggestions for the reverse? basically an analog input (turn table&#x2F;cassette) that can be streamed over wifi as digital output

Should also mention this does not support video.

These work too for $30 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B01HFYZDNC&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B01HFYZDNC&#x2F;</a> but it might be a security threat to have them on your LAN, I have no idea what software they run.