Are there any plans for AmpliPi to consider support for the CM4 or CM5 to expand capabilities, particularly with AirPlay 2?
Referring to this:
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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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?
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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Good enough for me! Thank you so much for a response!
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)
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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This is still blocked on us updating to a 64-bit OS, which is still a fairly large lift on our part. I don’t have a timeline for when that will happen.
I sincerely appreciate the response! My build is about done, but I still have a couple of months before buying hardware. I have my fingers crossed for what you’re all doing! The only thing holding me back is the multiple Airplay 2 streams.
Link, would you happen to have an update on this?
Hey JTViolet!
I’m not Lincoln, but I do have an answer: I’m currently testing AmpliPi with 64 bit Raspbian Trixie so this is on the way to being solved.
This is part of a greater scheme to overhaul the OS, partitioning scheme, and update workflow so it may be a while before there’s any released results from that, and it may be even longer before we support multiple Airplay 2 streams after getting the overhaul out in the first place. In short, this is on the active docket and should be out in some number of months that I’m not prepared to estimate beyond “By end of year, ideally by end of summer”.
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Good to know, unfortunately for me, I was hoping to hold out but appreciate your response! Good luck!
I have a PI 4 sodimm module running in mine. I posted in a different category but it works fine (with software updates). It has 4G of ram which is quite a bit more than the stock CM3 has.
Running the latest 64 bit OS
I can take a look at the multiple airplay2 streams and see if it works.
would you mind giving an overview of how you want to use this?
I want to make sure I understand your need.
Sure! For example:
- My wife wants to airplay a song to zones 2, 3, 4
- I want to airplay a podcast to zones 1, 5
- A friend visiting wants to airplay a song to zone 6
All at the same time.
Nice! I was looking for different use cases I could test my new setup with and wanted to find and fix limitations. I confirmed I could do that with my new setup. So its definitely do-able..
Micronova should be able to pull it off after the move to 64 bit armbian.
Unfortunately mine won’t give you that out of the box as it:
- Requires that you upgrade to a pi cm4s (might work with a cm3+ but i haven’t tested)
- Is only tested against 1.0 (release day?) hardware. It should work with 2.0 but I don’t have one to test against.
- Most likely includes other bugs as my use cases are fairly limited.
- I am working on the containerized solution that enables this and it broke everything else except airplay
Are there different versions of the AmpliPi hardware out there right now? If there are, I suspect I’m running one of the oldest. I bought during the original KickStarter. If there is an upgrade path, I’d be interested in exploring that for sure.
For hardware upgrades, see Purchase "upgrades" - #2 by amplipi
For airplay, having multiple airplay 2 streams is entirely doable on a 64 bit OS with shairport-sync, they would just need to be containerized as to not have the same IP. See the docs here. You’ve already had experience with this in your rewrite by the looks of it, though it seems that your issue might’ve been attempting to containerize every stream type.
In our codebase, something like this could be achieved by going to /amplipi/streams/airplay.py and implementing a containerization wrapper around the subprocess, in your rewrite I have no idea.