Big News: Version 5.0 brings AirPlay 2 Surround Sound, Lossless Audio, FFmpeg Throughout

[mikebrady]

Airplay 2 Surround Sound and Lossless Audio

Version 5 of Shairport Sync (now in the development branch) supports Surround Sound and Lossless Audio in AirPlay 2 operation! If you have a HomePod mini or an AppleTV 4K (maybe other devices too), Shairport Sync Version 5 can now receive lossless or surround sound from them.

In addition, it supports 48,000 frames per second operation, built-in transcoding and mixdown and multichannel output to ALSA, PipeWire, sndio and PulseAudio.

FFmpeg Support in Classic AirPlay

Classic Shairport Sync now uses an FFmpeg decoder by default, for better continuing support and security, and also for built-in transcoding.

Breaking Update!

Version 5.0 is a breaking update -- you'll need to change some flags and settings.

Please look at the RELEASENOTES-DEVELOPMENT and the updated BUILD.md guide for more details.

No doubt many things have been forgotten -- please let us know, and be nice 🙂.

[MSL-DA]

Thank you very much. It's fantastic that you continue to develop and improve SPS 🙏

v5.0 breaks the ability to control sps devices in the Home app, unfortunately.

[mikebrady]

@TB31388, the 'maybe' is simply because it hasn't been tested with other devices. My guess is that it also works with full-size HomePods, but honestly I don't know -- perhaps users can chime in here...

I'm also guessing that the multichannel output is downsampled from Dolby Atmos, i.e. it's multichannel but doesn't have the added Atmos positional information.

[TB31388]

What about when stream from an iPhone? Will that work losslessly with airplay 2?

[mikebrady]

No, streaming from an iPhone is 48K AAC. Who knows, maybe it'll change in future...

[TB31388]

I see v5 has now been released - great work! Is it possible to stream losslessly from an iPhone or has Apple still limited this?

[mikebrady]

Still limited, I’m afraid. “Hope springs eternal in the human breast…”

[cbrunnkvist]

It's still a tiny bit unclear to me what is necessary to change in the config in order to try AirPlay 2 mode ... Like, the AIRPLAY2.md does not mention ports, but the sample config says something about changing port to 7000. Additionally, the .md file mentions NQPTP as a "companion application", making it sound as if you need to launch two processes..? Or maybe I'm not looking in the correct branch?

[mikebrady]

Thanks for the post. To get AirPlay 2 operation, Shairport Sync must be built with AirPlay 2 support, so it’s more than simply a config change. NQPTP is needed as well. Details are in the BUILD guide. Ports needed are listed on the TROUBLESHOOTING page, if they are of interest.

[mikebrady]

Just circling back here — Version 5 is now a full release.

[brianlay714]

just built a v 5.0 on an RPi 3B and it's working well! I understand that remote play/stop etc, is not available but can volume up/down be controlled over MQTT?