DIY AirPlay Board?

[Kalleg]

Hi everyone,

I am an avid user of Apples AirPlay technology. I have different speaker systems set up in my apartment (with AE), and I stream to these from my phone, laptop and IPad. For me this has become a vital part of my music listening and I can't imagine living without it.

The past 6 months the AirPlay technology has really been rolled out commercially with Denon, Marantz, Harman Kardon, B&O, Sony, Pioneer etc. integrating AirPlay functionality in their recievers and active speaker systems.

This is happening alongside Spotifys rollout in Europe who's clients/players stream to AirPlay more or less natively. I think we will see more and more of this in the future.

My question is: "where can we begin as DIY'ers?". I am well aware that we can use Apples Airport Express to get the functionality. But there must be a smarter alternative with a smaller footprint. Something like a small inexpensive Airplay module for building active speakers, a boombox, or if we want to build our own amplification with DAC and AirPlay module integrated? The possibilities are endless.

The only one I found is this one:

Bridgeco - Digital Media Player - BridgeCo

And is doesn't seem very accessible.

Do any of you have experience with this, or know of a product that does this? Any ideas are more than welcome. Alternatives too.

Thanks a bunch Kalle

[soren5]

Hi Kalle,

Thanks for highlighting this subject!

I’m afraid I can’t help you though, but as I’m also very interested in the AirPlay technology, I’d just like support this thread, hoping that there would be someone out there with some more knowledge about this. As you mentioned there are currently a lot of companies introducing AirPlay to their systems, and not only the big knowledge intensive hi-fi manufacturers that you list. A company like Libratone for example, is a recent start-up company that is focusing merely on wireless speakers using the AirPlay technology. My point is that there must be technology available out there, that we DIY’ers could make use of. No??

Søren

[macboy]

Some enterprising individuals have done a lot of work to reverse engineer Airplay:
AirTunes v2 UDP streaming protocol Free as in speech
I found the link above via this thread discussing Airplay and XBMC:
AirPlay target support integrated into XBMC natively? - XBMC Community Forum
I haven't read through the thread to see if there is more relevant information.

It's fairly common to connect microcontrollers with WiFi or ethernet these days. The tricky part would be getting iTunes to recognize your device. Then you would need to extract the audio data from the packets and finally send it to a codec/DAC chip. That last part is not as trivial as it sounds, but with some research, a workable and simple enough solution could be designed.

It might be worthwhile to proof-of-concept this device by implementing the protocol on a WiFi/ethernet enabled microcontroller platform, without the audio part. You would be concerned about negociating the link to iTunes, and make sure it starts sending audio packets. At first, you would discard the audio packets. Once you have iTunes sending you the audio data, then you can design the 2nd half of the hardware and start trying to make music from that data.