neophob.com

While the Apple Air­Port Express Base Sta­tion with 802.11n and Air­Tunes is quite afford­able, it’s a pity that Apple allow only AES encoded audio streams (aka Remote Audio Out­put Pro­to­col — raop). How­ever Jon Lech Johansen’s reversed the encryp­tion and released JustePort — a .NET tool. Mean­while other Open­Source appli­ca­tions sup­port the raop protocol:

VLC works out of the box, although the syn­tax is a bit strange.

The impor­tant para­me­ter is “–sout=’#transcode{acodec=alac, channels=2, samplerate=44100}: raop{access=http,mux=raw, host=192.168.1.15,volume=77}’”.

You may also open the VLC prefs / All / Stream Out­put / Default Stream Out­put Chain and enter:
#duplicate{dst=“transcode {acodec=alac, channels=2, samplerate=44100}: raop{host=192.168.111.15,volume=77}:display”,dst=display}

Hint: VLC did not work for me with those parameter:

Info from the VLC forum:

The Air­port Express will only take the Apple Loss­less codec, make also sure the sound is encoded with 44.1 kHz and not some­thing like 32 kHz or 22.05 kHz, as that’s all the Air­port Express understands.

raop-play did not work for me (cvs version):

There is also a ruby port of raop-play avail­able, check https://rubyforge.org/projects/raop/.

Pulseau­dio also sup­ports the RAOP pro­to­col, but I didn’t test it, but HE did…

Air­Tunes vs. Sqeeze­box (found here)

Well, they are two dif­fer­ent kinds of devices, really. The Air­port Express is a “push” type of device. The music is decoded on your com­puter and broad­cast to the AExp. All nav­i­ga­tion of your music col­lec­tion occurs on the com­puter; you can’t even skip to the next track with­out being in the same room as the machine. The Squeeze­box is a “pull” device; it grabs files from your server and decodes them on-board. As such it has its own UI for choos­ing what you want to lis­ten to and you don’t have to be in the same room (or, indeed, the same coun­try) as the source of the music, and your com­puter doesn’t even have to be on if you just want to lis­ten to Inter­net radio.