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Shairport: Turn Your Linux into an AirPlay Speaker

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Marco Mornati
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Marco Mornati
I build, self-host and sometimes break software in production — writing about AI tooling, coding agents and infrastructure.
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I just discovered and tested a nice project that allows you to create an AirPlay server to use as a simple speaker for your iOS device (for example send audio from your iPod to your Linux PC): Shairport!!

Overview
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Installing and using it on Fedora 16 is really simple.

Installation
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First of all you should install all the required packages to build this project:

yum install openssl-devel libao libao-devel perl-Crypt-OpenSSL-RSA perl-IO-Socket-INET6 perl-libwww-perl avahi-tools

Then, after a clone of the git repository:

git clone https://github.com/albertz/shairport.git

You can enter in the shairport directory and build it:

mmornati@desktop shairport$ make
cc -O2 -Wall   -DHAIRTUNES_STANDALONE hairtunes.c alac.o -o hairtunes -lm -lpthread -lssl -lcrypto -lao
cc -O2 -Wall   -c socketlib.c -o socketlib.o
cc -O2 -Wall   -c shairport.c -o shairport.o
cc -O2 -Wall   -c hairtunes.c -o hairtunes.o
cc -O2 -Wall   socketlib.o shairport.o alac.o hairtunes.o -o shairport -lm -lpthread -lssl -lcrypto -lao

Usage
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Now you can simply start the shairport script and check if everything works using your iOS device:

mmornati@desktop shairport$ perl shairport.pl
Established under name 'D2908EECAA5A@ShairPort 3882 on desktop'
requesting resend on 1 packets (port 53568)
From iPhone di Marco