Airplay as Music Provider

[nderooij]

Not sure if fully in line with the scope of this project, but just wanted to raise the suggestion :)

How about adding Airplay as player provider? To allow people to easily either select multiple speakers that don't have native Airplay functionality, or Airplay to the group player providers in MA?

Thanks!!

[OzGav]

Given that the purpose of MA is to serve your music via a centralised database what would you be airplaying to those speakers?

[OzGav]

OK so what advantage does MA provide for her?

[nderooij]

Ease of use, I don’t have to instruct on how MA works, but she can play music throughout the entire house.

But I’m starting to feel like that’s not the intention of MA, that’s fine. I was raising a thought.

[OzGav]

If I understand you correctly the general idea has been floated by the devs although not sure if they had Airplay in mind at the time. This would allow MA to do the grouping and sync playback where supported. If your girlfriend isn’t looking to be able to do that then I don’t see any advantage to putting MA in the playback path, you would be better to just stream directly to the player.

[matejdro]

My use case for this would be streaming podcasts from my phone to my room music system.

There does not appear to be a good solution at the moment for bridging podcasts into Music Assistants, so just streaming them from my phone seems to be the next best thing.

[User873902]

The advantage of using Music Assistant as a conduit over direct streaming would be:

1. AirPlaying to synced heterogeneous speaker groups
2. AirPlaying to speakers non-supported by Apple AirPlay (i.e. Google Speakers)

Music Assistant already has the output part of the puzzle figured out. But, the input is limited to only specific sources.

The success of the AirPlay/Google Cast framework hinges on the ability to spontaneously and effortlessly select desired input from online libraries from a local device, like YouTube, X, or Apple Podcasts. The content is often single-use and does not need to be a repeatable playlist. It doesn't need to be an automated workload, just an on-the-fly decision. AirPlay is seamlessly integrated into the Apple ecosystem.

Although MA focuses on building a collected library of music content, the same users also enjoy elongated content from YouTube, X, and Apple Podcasts and want to listen to the audio on their home speaker setups. Most of this content is speech - podcasts, audiobooks, interviews, news, lectures, short-stories, MS Teams meetings, Zoom meetings, etc. Bluetooth only allows playback to one speaker.

Understandably, the developers do not have to choose to make their product a solution for this problem.

[asosnovsky]

I second this, while it's nice to be able to use speaker groups inside of MA for streaming for these services. Sometimes I have guests who I would not expect to give access to MA on their phones. It would be nice to expose speakers (or speaker groups) that do not have native support for Airplay. Similarly to how the Aircast HA-Addon does for chromecasts.

[User873902]

Thanks for suggesting Aircast! Looks like Aircast requires HA-addons and can't be run directly from a docker container. Otherwise, it would seem an amazing solution for my needs.

[Juggler00]

I would also like to see this. I am currently using an LMS instance, and frequently Airplay a podcast from my phone to one of the players. This allows me to keep track of the progress.

Wondering if this project could work. It is already packaged as a Docker container, would just need to find a way to input the audio output into MA: https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync

[matejdro]

I'm currently using shairport-sync to stream into MPD:

1. Shairport outputs sound into raw file
2. VLC opens this RAW file and creates a HTTP audio stream
3. MPD opens this stream as a HTTP radio stream

This works, but it is very hacky and has considerable latency because of buffering on the MPD side(especially annoying with podcasts, where you pause the podcast and it keeps playing for a second or two).

I asked whether MA can be configured to be better in this regard, but no replies yet: https://github.com/orgs/music-assistant/discussions/2253

[firefrei]

I would also love to see airplay as music provider!

This is my setup:
I am streaming to multiple rooms using snapcast and MA. This works very well. In addition, I have added shairport-sync as a source on my snapcast server - and control speaker settings, volume levels, etc. via Home Assistant automations and the snapcast integration.
I am facing the challenge that MA creates a new, temporary snapcast source, and groups snapclient players once something is played. When I want to stream via Airplay now, I manually need to adjust the snapcast configuration outside MA. So double configuration overhead, partly-conflicting setups, and a less intuitive setup to control for the non-technicians in my home :-)

From my perspective, it would be great to have MA as the central entity for music/audio management of my home. This would also create a clear and linear call flow, and defined responsibilities:
Control: HA -> MA -> Snapserver
Streaming: Airplay/Spotfiy/Radio/Soundcloud/Files/... -> MA -> Snapclients

[firefrei]

Alternatively, a generic music provider could also help here. For example, a pipe input like snapcast provides. So I could add shairport as a music provider over the pipe provider, and control all the audio routing with MA.

#1114

[Juggler00]

Any chance the devs are looking at this?

[iko3]

I also have a use case for AirPlay as a music source. I have several speaker zones in my house, which I connected to my home server where I run multiple instances of shairport-sync to be able to stream to each of them individually.
I would rather have a centralized solution that allows me to both AirPlay or play directly from Spotify or Internet radio.