Emulate an Airplay Speaker

[Fireant456]

So I have been trying to get it setup so I can airplay to my spotify connect speakers (HK Citation ONE) speakers that were supposed to have AirPlay support but it seems it was buggy and removed by HK. I would like to allow my friends that have apple devices and possibly other apps other than spotify to play to the speakers which operate basically as chromecast devices/google home speakers.

When I was looking into Music Assistant it sounded like this was possible but I wasn't able to get the devices to show up as airplay devices. I tried adding a single speaker as a "speaker group" under the "universal" type but that doesn't seem to expose an airplay endpoint. Is this possible or is there another solution to accomplish this outside of Music Assistant?

[OzGav]

In order for this device to work with MA it has to support one of the protocols. Looking at the specs it is supposed to support cast so it should be auto discovered. If not look at your network and make sure you don’t have anything blocking the mdns broadcasts

[OzGav]

The AirPlay receiver plgin is now available in MA 2.7 and above https://www.music-assistant.io/plugins/airplay-receiver/

[jtatknox]

I tested this out and was really pleased that it worked to pipe an Airplay stream to a sendspin endpoint device. I have some questions that I could find in the docs: 1) I am sending high quality lossless audio from my source over airplay - after all of the transformations does the stream still end up at the sendspin endpoint player as lossless? 2) I am noticing it takes about 5 seconds for music to start playing and then a further five seconds to pause. Can you say more about whether this is expected delay behavior and estimate whether eventually it would be possible for it to be more responsive?

This type of plugin is really a killer feature for Roon users or any relatively closed ecosystem to get to play to sendspin. Big thanks!

[OzGav]

1. You can look at the Audio Pipeline to see what happens to the audio. It isn’t normally reduced in quality.
2. Buffering and API delays are normal particularly for streaming providers.

[jtatknox]

Thanks the pipeline view is useful.

I understand that API delays are expected, but 5 seconds seems a bit excessive for local AirPlay playback.

More specific feature request: If upstream audio is paused, it should pause in Music Assistant ideally within 1 second rather than requiring the entire 5 second audio buffer to empty.

Again I think that this is a really nice feature and could help to glue together a lot of devices as it moves toward maturity.

Kudos.

[Fireant456]

Seems to work great, would love to see improvements to the play/pause times at some point, but having a working proof of concept is great to see <3 Keep up the great work!