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[ikarius]

I've been using JRiver (got on board w/ MC17 when I built a new sound system), and I really love it.  I have Airfoil for Windows, and I picked up an airport express so I can stream from my music library (ripped primarily in FLAC) across a pure digital path to my sound system.  Using Gizmo on my Droid, I'm able to change what's playing, and it's really pretty nice.

Now I'm looking at the next iteration.  With the release of the Nexus 7 (and I'm sure there are folks out there with Kindle Fires), there's a really competent Android tablet available at a price point which I consider "justifiable".  While a phone interface (gizmo) is nice, a tablet interface could be drop-dead gorgeous.  I'm actually very interested in picking up the android development kit and taking a whack at making a tablet oriented remote control app- I know that JRiver exposes the API, so it's an intriguing project to me.  I have done development in many different languages on many different platforms, including SageTV for a while, so I should be able to do this.

One thing which would really make this solution killer would be adding airplay destinations as "zones" in JRiver. At that point, a remote app could simply directly choose to pipe to any airplay destination. I have seen from the forums that JRiver has some good reasons to be averse to Apple, but Airplay has gained substantial traction in the audio industry, and many of the higher end AV receivers have built-in airplay destination options.  Is there any chance of this happening?  I looked at the dbpoweramp Airport-UPnP app, and it's over 3 years old without any updates, and the folks who developed it said they're not going to invest in any more development for it.

So, any advice, cautions, or caveats to someone looking to do this?  Any glimmer of hope for built-in Airplay support?

[JimH]

Welcome to the forum.  The third party board here would be a good place to look at what others have done.

I believe Airplay Airfoil appears as a UPnP Renderer, in which case, MC should be able to play to it as a zone.

[ikarius]

JimH- from what I've gathered via the wiki and forum posts, Airplay does not normally appear as a uPnP device;  there was a piece of software released back in '09 which provided a translation layer, but the software is unmaintained at this point, dependent on a specific (old) version of bonjour, and seems to have some stability issues.  That's why I currently don't rely on that shim, and use airfoil hi-jacking instead.  Airfoil is maintained, but it's not manageable as a zone, thus my asking for the feature.

[rjm]

Jim, several of us have been suggesting AirPlay support would be a killer addition to MC. It appears from the above that you may not have had an opportunity to try AirPlay. May I respectfully suggest that you try it? Cost is modest for an Apple TV and Airport Express.

[ikarius]

No need for an appleTV- simply the Airport Express will do the trick; you simply configure it to join your existing wireless network, purchase the TOSlink cable, and plug it into any AVR. Airport Express runs $99, and the cable cost me $2.50 both off amazon.  It's the only pure digital wireless pipe I could come up with, and I searched high and low to find a wireless audio transmitter that was digital before realizing the Airport Express would do what I wanted. As a bonus, the Airport express has a wired ethernet jack, so if you have a device which can be network connected, but isn't wireless, you can use the airport express as a wired-to-wireless bridge to get that device on your network, in addition to the wireless digital sound transmission.  Also, a growing number of upper-end AV receivers can be airplay destinations themselves, along with growing numbers of sound gizmos and software which support the ability to send to airplay or receive airplay.

[rjm]

But wait, there's more!

The Airport Express is also a portable wireless router useful for those hotel rooms with a wire but no wireless.

Audio would be a fantastic first step. I suggested Jim also try the Apple TV because streaming video to it is painless to set up and works really well. We just need MC's library to drive it.

[ikarius]

Jim-
I cannot find any evidence in the documentation or options of Airfoil about it being a uPnP gateway, or anything at all in their documentation mentioning uPnP.  The JRiver Wiki points to a thread talking about dbPowerAmp Air PnP to do that, and that's the unsupported software I spoke of earlier.

[<°)))))><]

If you own an iPhone/iPad, you can use the apps JRemote or My River to stream from MC to iOS devices and use their
AirPlay capabilities to connect to AirPlay receivers. This works great for audio. The advantage of JRemote's full AirPlay
integration is: You can switch from JRemote to other apps like YouTube or TuneIn Radio, listen to their sound and
switch back to JRemote and the sound "follows". Depending on your use case, this will be more handy than "direct"
playback from MC to an AirPlay receiver would be (if it were possible...).

To get something like "direct" playback from MC to an AirPlay receiver, you can use the "hijack" funktion of AirFoil to reroute
MC's audio outputs via AirFoil. This works, but connection/reconnection sometimes fails and there are other disadvantages.


Aside from AirFoil (and iTunes...) the only other up to date Windows software that seems to be able to *send* AirPlay streams
is the "Remote Speakers Output Plug-In" from Eric Milles: http://emilles.dyndns.org/software/out_apx.html. It's a WinAmp plugin.
Unfortunately MC's support for WinAmp plugins seems to have been gone over the years. But I think it's still possible to write
a wrapper to use them as MC plugins... And Mr. Miles also offers source code (I have not looked at).

@ ikarius: Wouldn't that be a nice job?  

[ikarius]

@fish:  I don't own an iDevice, so that one won't work for me.  Part of my impetus here is the allure of doing this "properly" on a Google nexus tablet, which hits a nice price/performance point to me, and gets me a good excuse to jump into android development.

I'll take a look @ the remote speaker plugin though, that might have some promise.  However, a true built-in feature would simplify this whole thing immensely.  Using shims for re-routing the audio is OK for those of us who are more technically inclined, but they rarely work completely reliably and when something goes wrong, those who aren't technically inclined tend to end up throwing up their hands and walking away.

Cheers
   Ikarius

[kiwi]

If it would make a difference, I'd happily chip in to help buy an AppleTV for the guys at JRiver to play with

I know that my NAS from Synology supports direct AirPlay support:
http://www.synology.com/dsm/home_home_applications_audio_station.php?lang=us

But I still haven't found a better interface for music than MC.