Show HN: AirAP AirPlay server – AirPlay to an iOS Device

[neon443]

I made AirAP because I wanted a simple way to play sound from my Mac Mini when my speaker broke. But it’s got a ton of other uses too, like testing how audio sounds like on different devices, or repurposing old wired speakers.

This was incredibly fun to make - can’t wait for you all to see it!

[LowResHusband]

That's interesting! Does it work for streaming video or just audio? Sometimes I'd love to AirPlay from my video editing software to my iPhone to check how it looks on the smaller screen, checking colors and overall appearance.

[ptk]

We’ve been looking for something like this for our conference room. A PC presenting on a large TV, but mirrored/AirPlayed on iPads for anyone that wanted a version closer to their face.

[karhuton]

You can give this a go. Made it for just this type of scenarios: https://bluescreen.live

If it works for you, happy the help you setup a private instance or something. And for in-office use, maybe optimize for quality rather than minimal updates it is now.

[mkrahul]

Sunshine and moonlight are what you need.

[bound008]

Thank you so much for checking something off of my todo list!

Apple TV lets you share with two sets of apple headphones, which is awesome... but I wanted a way to:

* Share to more than two sets * Extend coverage past the (very generous) bluetooth range of AirPods. * Have lossless (albeit 44khz/16bit) wireless audio with audiophile headphones.

I was considering using an esp32, but so happy this exists now! Thanks!

[whycome]

Doesn’t this still limit to one device?

[bound008]

I haven't tried it yet but on Apple devices you can AirPlay audio to multiple devices. I think the limit on AirPlay 2 might be 16.

[Lalabadie]

Bluetooth output is limited to one device, Airplay (from one device) can stream to several receivers.

[bound008]

On Apple devices you can stream to two bluetooth destinations if they are Apple (/beats) devices that can support it.

[doublerabbit]

Neat way to turn an iDevice in to a usable DAC.

[bilekas]

This is actually something I've been looking for for a while, through some workarounds with jelkyfin and others I've been able to navigate something but this seems promising.

I've got a few questions maybe later with the protocols and stuff but so far from initial look, it seems super promising.

Nice job really!

[planetpluta]

A lot of apps allow you to AirPlay to multiple devices at once — would be neat to put this on a bunch of iphones to simultaneously play music

[r00fus]

Any suggestions for such apps? I'm planning using something like this for a silent disco...

[atmanactive]

https://sonobus.net

[whycome]

How old of a device can I install this on? (Eg to make an old phone an AirPlay receiver).

Edit: looks like ios17 is earliest

[neon443]

I’m working on back porting it now

[zlies]

Nice work! Do you think that it is possible to port this to watchOS?

[bri3d]

It's just a thin wrapper for https://github.com/qasim/Airstream (I think it's very lame that the README doesn't mention this), which I think would work in a watchOS app although I'm not 100% sure it would get approved.

[neon443]

I think I could take a look, but watchOS has different limitations for background apps You mean u want to run the app on Apple Watch?

[zlies]

I‘m thinking about an app on the watch, that acts as an airplay (video) receiver, so I can stream and watch videos on my wrist while cooking

[neon443]

Sadly the shairplay library only supports audio so that’s the best that I can do without using a different implementation

[zlies]

What a pity! Thanks for replying anyway! :)

[reboot81]

Works great from iPhone to iPhone.

[Aurornis]

This is cool, but like the other comment said I think it would be prudent to mention in the README that this uses the Airstream project for the AirPlay implementation: https://github.com/qasim/Airstream

I thought this was a new Airplay implementation from the way it was described, but then I looked at the source code and realized there wasn’t much there. Nothing wrong with wrapping a library, but it’s nice to mention the technologies used and set expectations.

[neon443]

I’ve fixed the readme to add a link to airstream

[yunohn]

Libraries are made to be used as the base for the actual application. I checked your GitHub link - no clue how I’d use it without coding an entire solution.

[Aurornis]

Absolutely. That’s why they’re open source.

But it’s a common courtesy to credit the foundations you build upon when they’re doing the heavy lifting for an app.

If you look at the Airstream repo, you’ll see that it prominently credits the underlying library that it uses for a lot of the AirPlay foundational work.

[pvg]

These threads are really about discussing the work and less about policing projects' formatting, names, credits, etc. It's just way, way, way less interesting.

[Aurornis]

> These threads are really about discussing the work

That’s what I was trying to do. I opened up the code, started reading, and realized it wasn’t really what I thought it was.

I’m not trying to “police” arbitrary things, I’m trying to explain what the project is.

There’s been a recent trend of “Show HN” projects taking credit for other people’s work, like the “KVSplit” Show HN from several weeks ago that claimed credit for some upstream features in another project by wrapping it up in a separate repo and writing some LLM-generated claims.

[bri3d]

I think that name policing and “the whole project is really just a wrapper for another thing” are dramatically different points of discussion.

[pvg]

“Just a wrapper” is tropey drive-by grump, not a constructive critique. “Your face is just a wrapper” is as true and as boring.

[throwanem]

There is room for both. Of needless naysaying we could do with less, though.

[pvg]

There really isn't because the boring stuff is easy to harumph about and tends to eat up entire posts. E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44161021

Without massive moderator intervention that whole submission would have been buried in cruft. Better to not start cruftalanches to begin with.

[varenc]

I'm impressed this is so instantly installable via test flight! I have a suspicion Apple my pull this soon.

[jiveturkey]

I wouldn't think so, since it's not AirPlay 2.

[neon443]

It isn’t, but AirPlay 2 doesn’t have CD quality audio it’s compressed aac