Shairport Sync

Shairport Sync is an w:AirPlay audio player — it plays audio streamed from iTunes, iOS devices and third-party AirPlay sources such as ForkedDaapd and others. Audio played by a Shairport Sync-powered device stays synchronised with the source and hence with similar devices playing the same source. In this way, synchronised multi-room audio is possible without difficulty. (Hence the name Shairport Sync, BTW.)

Shairport Sync does not support AirPlay video or photo streaming.

Shairport Sync is a fork of the original Shairport which was based on reverse-engineering Apple's key used in its AirPort Express. Be advised that this functionality may be removed at Apple's discretion.

Installation

Install the shairport-sync package.

Configuration

The configuration file can be found at /etc/shairport-sync.conf. It contains useful comments and configuration hints. More documentation is available in the README file.

Starting

Start/enable shairport-sync.service using systemd.

Daemon Setup

If you want to run shairport-sync as a daemon you will need to have a folder created in /var/run which is a tempfs by default in archlinux. To have a folder created automatically on boot create a tempfiles configuration file, for example

/usr/lib/tempfiles.d/shairport-sync.conf

d /var/run/shairport-sync 0755 username group

you can now use shairport-sync -d to run shairport-sync as a daemon, and shairport-sync -k to kill the daemon.