Airplay allows you to conveniently play music and videos over the air from your iOS or Mac OS X devices on remote speakers.
Since we just recently “migrated” almost all audio equipment in the house to SONOS multi-room audio we were missing a bit the convenience of just pushing a button on the iPad or iPhones to stream audio from those devices inside the household.
To retrofit the Airplay functionality there are two options I know of:
1: Get Airplay compatible hardware and connect it to a SONOS Input.
You have to get Airplay hardware (like the Airport Express/Extreme,…) and attach it physically to one of the inputs of your SONOS Set-Up. Typically you will need a SONOS Play:5 which has an analog input jack.
2: Set-Up a RaspberryPi with NodeJS + AirSonos as a software-only solution
You will need a stock RaspberryPi online in your home network. Of course this can run on virtually any other device or hardware that can run NodeJS. For the Pi setting it up is a fairly straight-forward process:
You start with a vanilla Raspbian Image. Update everything with:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
Then install NodeJS according to this short tutorial. To set-up the AirSonos software you will need to install additional avahi software. Especially this was needed for my install:
sudo apt-get install git-all libavahi-compat-libdnssd-dev
You then need to get the AirSonos software:
sudo npm install airsonos -g
After some minutes of wait time and hard work by the Pi you will be able to start AirSonos.
sudo airsonos
And it’ll come up with an enumeration of all active rooms.
And on all your devices it’ll show up like this:
and
