shairport-sync/FREEBSD.md

Shairport Sync on FreeBSD

This guide, for a recent FreeBSD system, is to build Shairport Sync to output to the sndio and/or the ALSA sound systems.

The sndio back end is based on the work of Tobias Kortkamp (t6).

ALSA is not "native" to FreeBSD, but it has been ported to some architectures.

Shairport Sync can be built as an AirPlay 2 player (with some limitations) or as "Classic" Shairport Sync – a player for the older, but still supported, AirPlay (aka "AirPlay 1") protocol.

Overall, you'll be building and installing two programs. The first one is NQPTP, a companion app that Shairport Sync uses for AirPlay 2 timing, and the second one is Shairport Sync itself. Build and install NQPTP first. If you are building Classic Shairport Sync, NQPTP is unnecessary and can be omitted.

General

This build was done on a default build of freebsd 12.3-RELEASE-p5.

First, update everything:

# freebsd-update fetch
# freebsd-update install

Next, install the pkg package manager and update its lists:

# pkg
# pkg update

Subsystems

Install the Avahi subsystem. FYI, avahi-app is chosen because it doesn’t require X11. nss_mdns is included to allow FreeBSD to resolve mDNS-originated addresses – it's not actually needed by Shairport Sync. Thanks to reidransom for this.

# pkg install avahi-app nss_mdns

Add these lines to /etc/rc.conf:

dbus_enable="YES"
avahi_daemon_enable="YES"

Next, change the hosts: line in /etc/nsswitch.conf to

hosts: files dns mdns

Reboot for these changes to take effect.

Building

Install the packages that are needed for Shairport Sync to be downloaded and built:

# pkg install git autotools pkgconf popt libconfig openssl sndio

• Add alsa-utils if you wish to use ALSA.
• Omit sndio if you don't intend to use the sndio subsystem.
• Add libplist libsodium ffmpeg e2fsprogs-libuuid vim if you are building for AirPlay 2.

At this point, if you intend to build Shairport Sync for AirPlay 2, you should build and install NQPTP, a companion application that provides AirPlay 2 timing support for Shairport Sync. You'll find the software itself and an installation guide here. Once you have built, installed and enabled NQPTP, you can proceed with building Shairport Sync.

Now, download Shairport Sync from GitHub:

$ git clone https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync.git
$ cd shairport-sync

If you are building the AirPlay 2 version of Shairport Sync, for the present you should checkout the development version:

$ git checkout development

Next, configure the build and compile the shairport-sync application:

$ autoreconf -i -f
$ ./configure  --with-avahi --with-ssl=openssl --with-sndio --with-os=freebsd --with-freebsd-service
$ make

• Add --with-airplay-2 if you wish to build the AirPlay 2 version of Shairport Sync.
• Add --with-alsa if you wish to include the ALSA back end.
• Omit the --with-sndio if you don't want the sndio back end.
• Omit the --with-freebsd-service if you don't want to install a FreeBSD startup script, runtime folder and user and group -- see below for more details.

Installation

Enter the superuser mode and do a make install:

$ su
# make install

With the ./configure options shown above, this will install the shairport-sync program along with a sample configuration file at /usr/local/etc/shairport-sync.conf. A service startup script will also be installed to launch Shairport Sync as a daemon. In addition, a shairport-sync user and group will be added to enable shairport-sync to run with a low level of privilege (a primitive form of extra security).

Finally, edit /usr/local/etc/shairport-sync.conf to customise your installation, e.g. service name, etc. To make the shairport-sync daemon load at startup, add the following line to /etc/rc.conf:

shairport_sync_enable="YES"

You can launch the service as superuser, or simply reboot the machine.

Using the sndio backend

The sndio back end does not yet have a hardware volume control facility. You should set the volume to maximum before use, using, for example, the mixer command described below.

Setting Overall Volume

The mixer command can be used for setting the output device's volume settings. You may have to experiment to figure out which settings are appropriate.

$ mixer vol 100 # sets overall volume

If you've installed alsa-utils, then alsamixer and friends will also be available.