I have used PulseAudio, but it sometimes works, sometimes it does not... Also my Rhythmbox doesn't play the songs sometimes and just hangs there paused. Is there a more stable option to stream and listen to music on my AirTunes?
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Another Suggestion: Try different players - like Totem. But if the issue still exists then its the plugin :(– megubyteAug 6, 2010 at 19:57
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7 Answers
1) PulseAudio
We can define an existing AirTunes device (e.g. Airport Express) as an output audio sink for Pulse Audio by installing paprefs and pulseaudio-module-raop
and running Pulseaudio Preferences:
In the first tab Network Access tick "Make discoverable Apple AirTunes sound devices available locally".
As soon as the device is registered in the local network we can switch to this device from Sound Settings:
Choose the name you have registered your AirTunes device (e.g. "Wohnzimmer" in this example). Note that we can not switch the output while a media player is streaming to our soundcard. Pause or stop your player before changing output sinks. Streams will have a delay of about 3 to 4 seconds.
2): VLC
The vlc media player claims to be able to stream audio via the RAOP protocol directly to an AirTunes device. However so far I was unable to achieve this with VLC 2.0 so I can't give you directions here.
3) Stream2ip
After downloading and installing the DEBIAN package for stream2ip the application needs to be set up for streaming to the Air Tunes device by running Preferences from the man window:
Select the device Airport Express and type in the IP (the port is optional) of the device. By choosing Autoconnect and a time interval >0 seconds the application will listen for the AirTunes device on the given IP to connect as soon as the device is ready:
The advantages of stream2ip over simply using Pulseaudio Sound Settings are:
- Wait for a device to connect as soon as it is present.
- Re-establish an interrupted connection.
- No need to stop playback of a running media player to connect.
- Restore previous output when the external device is turned off
ps3mediaserver should be able to stream music to your AirTunes.
I don't really think so if you are saying "I want to listen to my mp3's" because the plugin is closed-source so we cant control it. Sorry!
Any other format should be fine.
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I'm sorry, I'm just used to saying mp3s when I'm referring to my digital music, but I have everything in AAC...– SergioAug 6, 2010 at 19:46
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1MP3 is not closed source.. It's just patented. se here: lwn.net/Articles/165985 Aug 8, 2010 at 23:27
There is an alsa driver for raop_play (http://raop-play.sourceforge.net/alsa_raoppcm.html) but it isn't included in the deb package and it hasn't been updated for a while. I've never had enough problems with PulseAudio to need it, but if you don't mind compiling from source you can give it a shot.
gstreamer-faad is plugin for playing mp4 dont know if thqat wil work with AACs... check out this post on the ubuntu forums: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=14242
More a comment than an answer, but I tried using Pulse Audio Preferences to stream to an Airtunes-capable Airport Express. The results were less than stellar. There's some buffering problems that caused it to not work as well as it should have worked, and I pretty much gave up on the idea for now.
I've had the same problem with elementary 0.3.2. It looks like the cause of the problem is not the buffer size, but rather the network manager, which apparently intermittently has the WiFi device scan for networks. This seems to interrupt the stream, so independently of the buffer size there are little parts of the stream missing, which produces the stuttering effect.
I was able to fix it by setting the BSSID of my WiFi connection. It's fairly easy, all you have to do is go to the settings of your connection. There's a pull-down menu named "BSSID" which is usually empty, but if you open it it offers you a string of characters. Pick that one, and it'll work fine.
Enjoy your music and rock on!
