ShairPort

By James Laird (announcement)

What it is

This program emulates an AirPort Express for the purpose of streaming music from iTunes and compatible iPods and iPhones. It implements a server for the Apple RAOP protocol. ShairPort does not support AirPlay v2 (video and photo streaming).

Build Requirements

Required:

• OpenSSL

Optionally:

• libao
• PulseAudio
• avahi

Runtime Requirements

You must be running an mDNS (Bonjour) daemon. On a Mac, this will be running already. Otherwise, you must be running avahi-daemon or Howl.

How to get started

./configure
make
./shairport -a 'My Shairport Name'

The triangle-in-rectangle AirTunes (now AirPlay) logo will appear in the iTunes status bar of any machine on the network, or on iPod/iPhone play controls screen. Choose your access point name to start streaming to the ShairPort instance.

Audio Outputs

Shairport supports different audio backends. For a list of available backends and their options, run shairport -h. Note that options are supplied to backends at the end of the commandline, separated by --, for example:

shairport -o ao -- -d mydriver -o setting=thing

Thanks

Big thanks to David Hammerton for releasing an ALAC decoder, which is reproduced here in full. Thanks to everyone who has worked to reverse engineer the RAOP protocol - after finding the keys, everything else was pretty much trivial. Thanks also to Apple for obfuscating the private key in the ROM image, using a scheme that made the deobfuscation code itself stand out like a flare. Thanks to Ten Thousand Free Men and their Families for having a computer and stuff. Thanks to wtbw.

Contributors to version 1.x

• James Laird
• Paul Lietar
• Quentin Smart
• Brendan Shanks
• Peter Körner
• Muffinman
• Skaman

Contributors to version 0.x

• James Laird, author
• David Hammerton, ALAC decoder
• Albert Zeyer, maintainer
• Preston Marshall
• Mads Mætzke Tandrup
• Martin Spasov
• Oleg Kertanov
• Rafał Kwaśny
• Rakuraku Jyo
• Vincent Gijsen
• lars
• Stuart Shelton
• Andrew Webster

Known Ports and Tools

• Java:
  • JAirPort
  • RPlay
• Windows:
  • shairport4w
• OS X:
  • ShairportMenu, a GUI wrapper as a menu widget
  • MacShairport