AirPlay Hub

The same music in every room, from your Linux machine. Spotify in the kitchen, PlexAmp on the porch and radio in the bedroom — all at once, each with its own volume.

Airfoil exists for macOS and Windows. Nothing like it existed for Linux. This is that app.

Why it exists

I have a 2009 Mac Mini that is always on. It does exactly one thing: stream music from PlexAmp to the speakers around the house, through Airfoil.

Apple dropped support for it long ago. It was kept alive with OpenCore Legacy Patcher, but Ventura is no longer supported, and Sequoia would only make a seventeen-year-old machine slower still. Buying a new Mac to keep doing one single thing felt wrong.

CachyOS turned out to run beautifully on a MacMini3,1. That left one problem: there was no Airfoil for Linux. So I built it.

Thanks to Rogue Amoeba for Airfoil, which gave both the idea and the model for the interface.

What you can stream to

Everything that speaks AirPlay, in one list:

• HomePod, Apple TV and Macs — including the newer ones that require FairPlay
• Volumio and shairport-sync on a Raspberry Pi
• AirPort Express, if you still have one running

You never have to know which kind a room is. The app works out how to reach each device, and every room looks the same regardless.

Getting started

You need an Arch-based system running PipeWire — CachyOS, EndeavourOS, Manjaro or Arch itself.

git clone https://github.com/napthemax/airplay-hub.git
cd airplay-hub
./install.sh

The script tells you what is missing and offers to install it. Then it sets everything up: speaker discovery, the audio path to AirPlay 2 devices, a menu entry, and the web interface for your phone.

When it finishes, look for AirPlay Hub in your application menu. No terminal needed after that.

To undo it: ./install.sh --uninstall

Using it

Send the audio here. Press Send system audio here and everything playing on the machine goes to the hub. To move a single app instead, pick it from the list and press Move.

Turn rooms on. Press the speaker button to the left of a room's name. It lights up blue while that room is playing. Volume is per room, and the slider at the top controls all of them at once.

From your phone. Open http://your-machines-ip:8730 — the installer prints the address. Same rooms, same buttons. Add it to your home screen and it behaves like an app.

If the phone times out, a firewall is dropping it. The installer offers to open the port; to do it by hand:

sudo ufw allow from 192.168.1.0/24 to any port 8730 proto tcp

Use your own subnet — ./diagnose.sh prints the exact command.

The web interface only accepts connections from your own network. There is no login, and it should never be port-forwarded.

If the rooms are out of sync

This section only applies if you own both AirPlay 1 and AirPlay 2 speakers. With only one kind, every room takes the same path, shares the same buffer and stays in sync by itself — the control is not even shown. The app detects what you have and adapts.

Running a mix, rooms can drift apart, because the two audio paths buffer differently. You hear it as an echo between rooms. Two settings fix it.

The HomePod rooms lag behind the others. That is the normal case — a HomePod buffers more on its own than a Raspberry Pi does, and there is no way to read how much from the outside. Lower OwnTone's buffer until they meet:

./sync.sh owntone 1750

Listen, adjust in steps of ~250 ms, listen again. The value is saved.

One room is off on its own. Press i on that room's row. There is a slider that shifts just that room. It can only hold a room back; a room that lags cannot be pulled forward, and pushing the slider too far makes the audio clip. Keep the buffer above the slider value by at least 500 ms.

A known limit: the slider stops at -2000 ms, and a HomePod can sit further behind than that. Rooms of the same kind stay in sync with each other, so the gap only appears where AirPlay 1 and AirPlay 2 rooms play together. If that bothers you, one kind of receiver throughout is the real answer.

Troubleshooting

./diagnose.sh

walks the whole chain and reports what is missing.

Symptom	Likely cause
A room is greyed out, "not answering"	The speaker lost power or network. The app keeps looking and brings it back by itself.
A room is missing entirely	Check it is on the same network. ./probe-raop.sh lists everything that announces itself.
Audio stutters	Almost always the network. A Raspberry Pi 3 wants a 2.5 A supply — undervolting hits WiFi first. Ethernet beats WiFi.
A HomePod is silent but visible	The status line says if the audio path is down. journalctl -u owntone -f shows what the engine is doing.

How it works

The machine's audio collects in one virtual device, and from there it goes out to every room that is switched on:

PlexAmp ─┐                              ┌─► loopback ─► AirPlay 1 device
Firefox ─┼─► "AirPlayHub" ──────────────┤
Spotify ─┘                              └─► OwnTone ──► AirPlay 2 device

Two paths, because both are needed: PipeWire reaches open AirPlay receivers directly, while HomePods and Apple TVs require FairPlay pairing that only OwnTone can do. Which path a room uses is shown behind the i button, but you never have to choose.

Files

File	Role
main.py	The window
webui.py	Web interface for your phone
rooms.py	Merges both audio paths into one list of rooms
pwhub.py	The PipeWire side
owntone.py	The OwnTone side
bridge.py	Feeds OwnTone with the machine's audio
install.sh	Install and uninstall
setup-owntone.sh	Makes OwnTone ready to run
sync.sh	Shows and adjusts timing between rooms
diagnose.sh	Environment check when nothing plays
probe-raop.sh	Shows what each speaker on the network supports
debug-owntone.sh	Turns on verbose logging in OwnTone

License

MIT — see LICENSE.