Losty's Blog

Nur so: ganz unscheinbar unter "Beispiele" verbirgt sich hier mal eine echt spannende Auflistung der verschiedenen aktuellen Techniken inklusive der vom Marketing häufig unterschlagenen Netto-Bitraten...

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datendurchsatz#Beispiele

Man man man... in Berlin ist gerade mehr Winter, als in CH... :-O

The Synology DSM already provides quite some fancy ways to stream music (and even video) *FROM* the Synology NAS via Airplay to Airplay Receivers e.g. Apple-TV, etc. (see: Synology's Blogpost on Airplay).

However: unfortunately I could not find any out-of-the-box-solution or a (neither official nor un-official) package to use the Synology NAS as an Airplay-Receiver to stream music *TO* the NAS (...and play back via an USB soundcard).

All I could find were some horribly complicated instructions on how to compile that stuff on your own and eventually get it working. I have to mention and thank...

• http://blog.elsdoerfer.name/2011/05/15/shairport-on-synology-nas/ and
• http://www.synology-forum.de/showthread.html?28057-DiskStation-als-Airplay-Empf%E4nger

...for providing me some guidance. Since those posts are about 1-2 years old now, I guess newer packages made it a lot easier for me. In contrast to their approaches, I could now use...

• a C-only fork of shairport (unmodified ;-))
• ALSA instead of OSS for sound output (way less hassle)

Prerequisites

My setup is as follows:

• Synology DS1512+ (Intel Atom thingy) with DSM 4.3-3776. Should work with others as well - not sure regarding ARM/PPC/etc... (feedback welcome)
• Audiolab M-DAC (A.10 firmware) as USB soundcard. Again: should work with others as well - however: you might want to check Synology's Compatibility List.

Software-sides:

• Apple-Bonjour enabled
• SSH-Login to that Synology
• A working IPKG (Hint: this link)

What do I have to do?

1. fetch needed IPKG packages:

> ipkg install pkgconfig gcc make openssl openssl-dev alsa-lib

2. fetch shairport

> wget "https://github.com/abrasive/shairport/archive/master.zip"
> unzip master.zip
> cd shairport-master

3. compile shairport

> ./configure
> CC=gcc make

4. Configure ALSA to allow playback for your user (by default not even root is allowed):

> echo "defaults.pcm.ipc_gid    \"root\"" > ~/.asoundrc

5. Launch shairport into backgound

> LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/lib ./shairport -p 5005 -a "Synology" &

Default Airplay port is 5000, which is also the alternative port of the Synology DSM. Can be changed using "-p" in shairport. "-a" specifies the name which will appear in Airplay.

Et voilà! Go to iTunes an try to use that new Airplay target.

Conculsion

Still a bit complicated to start and stop, but surprisingly this worked quite stable for the last hours now... ;-)

Next up: how do I compile a Synology Package... ;-)