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Shairport Sync on FreeBSD using sndio

Shairport Sync runs natively on FreeBSD using the sndio back end, thanks to the work of Tobias Kortkamp (t6).

sndio is "a small audio and MIDI framework part of the OpenBSD project and ported to FreeBSD, Linux and NetBSD" developed by Alexandre Ratchov (see also this paper for more details).

This is an initial note about installing Shairport Sync on FreeBSD.

The build instructions here install back ends both for sndio and ALSA. ALSA is, or course, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, so it is not "native" to FreeBSD, but has been ported to some architectures under FreeBSD.

General

This build was done on a default build of FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE-p9.

First, update everything:

# freebsd-update fetch
# freebsd-update install

Next, install the pkg package manager and update its lists:

# pkg
# pkg update

Subsystems

Install the Avahi subsystem. FYI, avahi-app is chosen because it doesn’t require X11. nss_mdns is included to allow FreeBSD to resolve mDNS-originated addresses – it's not actually needed by Shairport Sync. Thanks to reidransom for this.

# pkg install avahi-app nss_mdns

Add these lines to /etc/rc.conf:

dbus_enable="YES"
avahi_daemon_enable="YES"

Next, change the hosts: line in /etc/nsswitch.conf to

hosts: files dns mdns

Reboot for these changes to take effect.

Building

Install the packages that are needed for Shairport Sync to be downloaded and built successfully:

# pkg install git autotools pkgconf popt libconfig openssl sndio alsa-utils

Omit alsa-utils if you're not using ALSA. Likewise, omit sndio if you don't intend to use the sndio subsystem.

Now, download Shairport Sync from GitHub:

$ git clone https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync.git
$ cd shairport-sync

Next, configure the build and compile it:

$ autoreconf -i -f
./configure  --with-avahi --with-ssl=openssl --with-alsa --with-sndio --with-os=freebsd --with-freebsd-service
$ make

Omit --with-alsa if you don't want to include the ALSA back end. Omit the --with-sndio if you don't want the sndio back end. Omit the --with-freebsd-service if you don't want to install a FreeBSD startup script, runtime folder and user and group -- see below for more details.

Installation

Enter the superuser mode and do a make install:

$ su
# make install

With the ./configure options shown above, this will install the shairport-sync program along with a sample configuration file at /usr/local/etc/shairport-sync.conf. A service startup script will also be installed to launch Shairport Sync as a daemon. In addition, a shairport-sync user and group will be added and a directory will be created at /var/run/shairport-sync owned by the user shairport-sync. This will be used to hold the daemon's PID file.

Finally, edit /usr/local/etc/shairport-sync.conf to customise your installation, e.g. service name, etc. To make the shairport-sync daemon load at startup, add the following line to /etc/rc.conf:

shairport_sync_enable="YES"

You can launch the service as superuser, or simply reboot the machine.

Using the sndio backend

The sndio back end does not yet have a hardware volume control facility. You should set the volume to maximum before use, using, for example, the mixer command described below.

Setting Overall Volume

The mixer command can be used for setting the output device's volume settings. You may have to experiment to figure out which settings are appropriate.

$ mixer vol 100 # sets overall volume

If you've installed alsa-utils, then alsamixer and friends will also be available.