Set Up Apple AirPort Streaming To An AirPort Express device

From Nearline Storage
Jump to navigation Jump to search

I wanted to stream music from my Fedora 18 Linux box through my old AirPort Express device to my radio transmitter. This was motivated by my wanting to move my radio station server onto a virtualized server under VMware ESXi. There's no direct support for the audio hardware on my ESXi server.

  1. I have an old AirPort Express device so I needed to download AirPort Utility 5.6 to my MacBook in order to configure it. The current version of the Utility on my computer does not support the old version of the AirPort Express.
    • The Installer will not allow the AirPort Utility application to install because it is back level. To work around this I downloaded unpkg and manually unpacked the pkg file. I then moved the AirPort Utility app into my Applications folder.
    • I turned off the wireless networking and turned on the AirPlay function in my AirPort. The AirPort is connected to my network via an ethernet cable.
    • Note that the computer configuring the AirPort must be on the same network segment or wireless network as the AirPort in order to be able to see the AirPort. I had to change my computers network connection from the AirPort wireless network to the ethernet network as I reconfigured my AirPort.
  2. I installed the pulseaudio-module-zeroconf and paprefs packages on the Linux computer.
  3. My AirPort has an IP address of 192.168.1.1. I added the following lines to /etc/pulse/default.pa
 ### Load the roap module for my AirPort Express
 load-module module-roap-sink server=192.168.1.1
  1. I ran paprefs and selected both options on the Network Access tab.
  2. Reboot.
  3. paplay now sends audio to the AirPort.