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

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!

github.com

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203 points

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neon443

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2 days ago

45 comments

LowResHusband ・ 2 days ago

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 ・ 2 days ago

    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 ・ 2 days ago

      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 ・ 2 days ago

      Sunshine and moonlight are what you need.

bound008 ・ 2 days ago

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 ・ 2 days ago

    Doesn’t this still limit to one device?

    • Lalabadie ・ 2 days ago

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

      • bound008 ・ a day ago

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

    • bound008 ・ 2 days ago

      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.

doublerabbit ・ 2 days ago

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

bilekas ・ 2 days ago

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 ・ 2 days ago

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

whycome ・ 2 days ago

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 ・ 2 days ago

    I’m working on back porting it now

zlies ・ 2 days ago

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

  • bri3d ・ 2 days ago

    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 ・ 2 days ago

    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 ・ 2 days ago

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

        • zlies ・ 2 days ago

          What a pity! Thanks for replying anyway! :)

reboot81 ・ 2 days ago

Works great from iPhone to iPhone.

Aurornis ・ 2 days ago

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 ・ 2 days ago

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

  • yunohn ・ 2 days ago

    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 ・ 2 days ago

      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 ・ 2 days ago
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        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 ・ 2 days ago

          > 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 ・ 2 days ago
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          I think that name policing and “the whole project is really just a wrapper for another thing” are dramatically different points of discussion.

          • pvg ・ 2 days ago
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            “Just a wrapper” is tropey drive-by grump, not a constructive critique. “Your face is just a wrapper” is as true and as boring.

            • bri3d ・ 2 days ago

              A link to the utilized library is not simply drive-by grump. I agree with a lot of complaints about non-substantive grouchiness on HN but I can’t be sold on this one.

        • throwanem ・ 2 days ago
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          There is room for both. Of needless naysaying we could do with less, though.

          • pvg ・ 2 days ago
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            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.

            • throwanem ・ 2 days ago

              Well, fair enough, it'll take someone bolder than I to gainsay further in the face of that.

varenc ・ 2 days ago

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

  • jiveturkey ・ 2 days ago

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

    • neon443 ・ 2 days ago

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