Amplipi plans to support CM4 or CM5?

General AmpliPi Questions
1

Are there any plans for AmpliPi to consider support for the CM4 or CM5 to expand capabilities, particularly with AirPlay 2?

Referring to this:

2

We are considering newer CM modules for update to our system.

That’s said, I think you are mostly asking how we are planning on supporting multiple airplay 2 connections. That will require containerizing our airplay2 streams.

During testing we ran into a bug piping audio out of the container that required lots of architectural changes (switching to pulse or pipewire) or upgrading to a much more recent version of alsa and it’s utilities. This bug was fixed in later rasbian releases that happen to be only publised 64-bit.

To move forward we want to put out a release that supports 64-bit and make an update path to that release (either reflash the pi or improve our software updater). We are working on the underlying support for this now. After that we can have nice things like multiple airplay2 streams.

TLDR: we plan on supporting multiple airplay 2 streams on the current CM3 hardware. Newer hardware would give us more performance but is not required.

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3

I appreciate the response! Not to hold you to any timelines, but do you have a rough idea on when you’re hoping something like this might come to the product?

4

Our current timeline for the infrastructure support updates is about 3 months. At that point we can start testing changes to our airplay2 streams. if everything goes smoothly multiple airplay2 streams could land in 4 months or so. We realize this is a killer feature.

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5

Good enough for me! Thank you so much for a response!

6

To confirm:

I would need the AmpliPro and the Streamer 4 for AirPlay 2 support, is that right? Particularly, two separate AirPlay 2 streams (once available)

7

Nope you just need the AmpliPro unit. It has all you need for 6 zones of amplified audio with 4 audio streams (or 4 RCA inputs).

The streamer is made for upgrading older systems that have separate amplification and audio generation and needs an external controller to handle the integration between the 2.

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