I have converted over to apple music which means use of airplay. Looking at the shairport-sync project I see it is only implements airplay1. I would love to have spotify-connect like remote control of the stream rather than streaming from my phone, but even with the current setup I find the lossless apple streams sound better than spotify via spotify-connect or airplay.
So, any value in chasing airplay2? I could hook an apple tv optical out up to the amplipi to accomplish this I think, just not sure if there would be that much benefit. I’ve also opened feature requests at apple for the remote control option, but not holding my breath on that.
The shareport-sync works well, but in the summer when I wander too far from the house the stream can suffer. And when driving away to pick up food the music stops. Not ideal.
Shairport-sync, the underlying airplay client that we use, is working on integrating some of the airplay2 features on their development branch. Our current plan is to wait until those efforts mature.
It looks like they have made some decent progress over the past few months. I’ll make an issue to check into this soon. In the meantime do you happen to want to check out the new features on the development branch and see if it has the support you were looking for?
Hey, I’ve been playing around with the airplay2 functionality of shairport-sync and it seems quite good. The volume control issues look like they’re sorted out now.
We’ve been watching it as well. It is looking very mature at this point. Sadly we haven’t had that much time to test it out.
It looks like the two main use case it adds are:
distributed control of streaming audio, so several users can control a stream and users can leave the house and the audio keeps playing
individual control several audio outputs/zones at once from your iphone/ipad
Some of changes we have to consider from our side is that it has a significantly higher CPU load than the shairport1 implementation and that each shairport instance requires a dedicated network interface.
We need to do some testing to see how many shairport2 instances are feasible to run simultaneously in separate docker containers. Individual shairport2 docker containers are needed to provide separate network interlaces.
Sure! I’m happy to be a Guinea pig. Let me know how I can help out.
Edit: I wanted to share my use case if it helps. I have 2 zones on the Amplipi and 2 Bluetooth speakers with airplay bridges so I don’t have to deal with pairing each time. So the airplay 2 feature would make all of that transparent
