Over the last year, a brave team has intermittently been hard at work openly describing the protocol used by Apple’s Airport Express, RAOP. It turns out there are two protocols — Airtunes 1 and Airtunes 2. Airtunes 1 was described by Jon Lech Johansen, of DeCSS fame, but the Airtunes 1 protocol lacks crucial timing information needed for reliable and video-synced audio. This in particular has posed a problem for PulseAudio. Airtunes 2, to this date, has only been known by Apple and the proprietary third party software Airfoil. For the purpose of interoperability and education,
Today we open up the beginning of our Airtunes 2 specification to the community.
A member of the team is hard at work on the PulseAudio module, but if you’d like to help, don’t hesitate to contact us. And of course, implementing this in other places too would be more than welcome. Finally, we still need to finish the specification, so if you can offer any assistance, please do let us know. We’re on #airtunes2 on freenode.
Why exactly do we keep investing time in support for unnecessarily stupid Apple products if other solutions are cheaper and work out of the box, using open protocols?
This will just drive even more people into the hands of a company which built huge parts of its success on an open-source operating system kernel and pieces like Samba and Cups, but never gives anything back.
@Johannes
Because my brother gave me his Airport Express, and now I wanna play music out of it.
What open alternative pieces of hardware allow wireless streaming from PulseAudio? I’m not denying that they don’t exist; I just can’t recall any off hand.
@Johannes: they are giving back: just look at Webkit, the LLVM compiler and as the new owner they are improving CUPS too
I installed Pulsaudio on a Sheevaplug (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug) with an USB Soundcard attached. Pulseaudio is running in System Mode..
Works Ok.
[...] Detta på grund av att Apple krypterat signalen som går till enheten. Tack och lov har man lyckats hacka(reverse-engineering) protokollet så att man med hjälp av t.ex. Airfoil kan spela musik från [...]