Intro plus Apple Music

[MikeyFresh]

Couple of challenges with the new Apple Music is that at least on Big Sur the app does not connect to Airplay 1 receivers i.e. shairport-sync. Big Sur OS X itself though does via its volume options. Very odd. Maybe the app only supports Airplay 2 or possibly it will only enable Airplay connections if one subscribes to the music service ??

There are some devs working on reverse engineering Airplay 2 but its experimental and will prolly take a fair bit of time before it can be used reliably. https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync/issues/535

Here's the shairport-sync log when attempting to connect from the app.

Code:

64.528839395 "rtsp.c:2982" Connection 1: new connection from 192.168.1.125:59438 to self at 192.168.1.139:5000.
0.029079804 "rtsp.c:2597" Connection 1: terminated.

Here's the log when connecting from Big Sur itself.

Code:

112.988299353 "rtsp.c:2982" Connection 2: new connection from 192.168.1.125:59480 to self at 192.168.1.139:5000.
0.292795736 "rtsp.c:2663" Connection 2: Received an RTSP Packet of type "ANNOUNCE":
.
.
.
success

On my MacBook Air running Big Sur 11.5.2 I can connect to a Moode Airplay instance either directly, or through System Preferences - Sound - Output.

In the case of a direct in-app Airplay connection, for whatever reason the Apple Music desktop app will only output the AAC lossy version of the file as evidenced in Get Info for that track. However if I connect using System Preferences - Sound to Moode Airplay, the high resolution version of the file will play, again confirmed by Get Info about that track, or for that matter my ears.

EDIT: I can make the high resolution tracks play through a straight in-app Airplay connection, it must have been the Arcade Fire album I selected originally is not currently part of their high-res library so it gave me the AAC.