How does AirPlay work with audio|acacia?

Question

I'm interested in using audio|acacia, but i can't image how AirPlay works with this solution?

For example, i would like to setup 1 Server and 2 Players, all based on Raspberry Pi. Which devices appears in my iPhone as AirPlay devices? All Players? If so, i can stream Music to any specific Player. How is it possible with AirPlay to stream Music to all Players? Can i configure some predefined environments like "Player 1+2" which appears in the iPhone?

Maybe someone could explain the behavior behind this, thank you very much!

Answer 1

There currently is a single AirPlay entity published by audio|acacia that will appear as a streaming endpoint called "Stream to audio|acacia". Any number of AirPlay streaming capable devices (ie iOS, Mac OS X, etc) can stream to this endpoint at the same time. Each of the streams will appear under the AirPlay source as an item named after the streaming device (ie Bob's iPhone).

Any session may play this item as it would play any other item from any other source. Therefore the session can be playing to multiple sinks and is not restricted to playing only to other AirPlay devices.

We have many ideas on how to expand and improve this integration and will announce them after they are developed and when they are ready to be tested. Such improvements include adding some sort of shortcut to stream to predefined endpoints.

Comments

"Such improvements include adding some sort of shortcut to stream to predefined endpoints"

If by this you mean let a user AirPlay directly to an endpoint without needing to go into the acacia UI, that would be great. It would be nice to have an AirPlay endpoint named Bathroom that would go directly to the bathroom without needing to jump through hoops. If I want to AirPlay to multiple rooms then I could AirPlay to "Stream to audio|acacia" and then build a new session in whichever rooms I want.