Audio enthusiasts who prefer to listen to music on their existing speakers have been waiting for some time to see AirPlay 2 cracked, and that day has now arrived.
Three developers who have been working on the problem for some time say they have now done it…
The original announcement was made in a Slack group, and then posted to GitHub.
Apple uses a proprietary streaming protocol which means only speakers that have licensed the tech from Apple can receive and decode the audio. But that protocol has now been reverse-engineered.
What this means is that multi-room playback from iOS devices will be possible to any speaker system when connected to something like a Raspberry Pi running an app designed to receive and decode AirPlay 2 audio streams.
The developer who made the announcement was quick to point out that cracking the protocol is only the first step: the team still needs to build an app around it before it can be used.
AirPlay 1 had long been cracked, so there are already apps like shairport-sync which allows iTunes to send music to non-supported speakers via a small computer. There’s a tutorial here on how to do this on a Raspberry Pi.
However, although multi-room playback using AirPlay 1 is supported by iTunes, streaming from an iOS device requires AirPlay 2. Now that we’ve seen AirPlay 2 cracked, it shouldn’t be long before you can do the same thing from an iOS device.
If all this sounds like too much trouble, there is an increasing number of AirPlay 2 speakers and receivers available. However, you do need to check the specs carefully to ensure that AirPlay 2 is specifically listed, as a lot of companies include the term in their SEO keywords when the product only supports AirPlay 1.
You can find some recommended AirPlay 2 speakers in our audio gift guide.
Photo: Shutterstock
