Raspberry Pi with Sonos S1

January 24, 2024

The Raspberry Pi, the ultimate in-home audio solution?

My situation

The Sonos Play 5 Gen 1 doesn’t have AirPlay support. It does Spotify Connect, but no AirPlay. While Spotify Connect is pretty good at just playing background music, there’s times that someone wants to play a song from SoundCloud, or YouTube, or some other service.

The solution

A Raspberry Pi to the rescue! This Pi is actually doing a lot at once - I already have raspotify and shairport-sync to add AirPlay and Spotify Connect to a Bose SoundDock connected via a 3.5mm audio cable.

Because Sonos speakers can be managed over Wifi, I can actually have the physical jack be used for the Bose speaker, and a separate AirPlay target for the Sonos speaker.

The setup

SSH into your Raspberry Pi.
Set up an airconnect directory with
```
cd /var/lib/
sudo mkdir airconnect
```

Get the files from philippe44’s AirConnect Github repo with

cd ~
wget https://github.com/philippe44/AirConnect/releases/download/1.7.0/AirConnect-1.7.0.zip
sudo mv AirConnect-1.7.0.zip /var/lib/airconnect/

Unzip the files with

cd /var/lib/airconnect/
sudo unzip AirConnect-1.7.0.zip

Give the binaries executable permissions with
```
chmod +x /var/lib/airconnect/*
```
Create a service file with
```
sudo vi /etc/systemd/system/airupnp.service
```
and paste in the following:
```
[Unit]  
Description=AirUPnP bridge  
After=network-online.target  
Wants=network-online.target  

[Service]  
ExecStart=/var/lib/airconnect/airupnp-linux-arm -l 1000:2000 -Z -x /var/lib/airconnect/airupnp.xml   
Restart=on-failure  
RestartSec=30  

[Install]  
WantedBy=multi-user.target   
```
Some things to note:
- You might have to change the directory if your folder isn’t /var/lib/airconnect/
- There’s a -l 1000:2000 flag. This adds some latency to the audio, but it’s recommended from the Github page.
- You can use nano if you don’t like vi. However, you should be aware that vi is superior in every way. Make sure to :wq when you’re done.
Register the service with
```
sudo systemctl enable airupnp.service
```

If you don’t need to change the name of the speakers, skip to 10.

(Optional) Create the config file from the binary with
```
/var/lib/airconnect/airupnp-linux-arm -i airupnp.xml
```
Note, run this command in a directory you’re allowed to write files to. Otherwise, it’ll give an error.

I moved my airupnp to the /var/lib/airconnect/ folder, and then edited it.
(Optional) Edit the config file with
```
sudo vi /var/lib/airconnect/airupnp.xml
```
In here, you can change the names of speakers. I changed the speaker in the Kitchen from “Kitchen+” to “Kitchen Sonos”.
Start the service with
```
sudo service airupnp start
```

The result

The Sonos speaker now shows up as an AirPlay target, and can be used to play audio from any AirPlay device. There’s a second of latency between pressing play and the audio starting, but it plays music just fine.

This entire process shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes of tinkering, but I have had experience with sshing into my Raspberry Pi, and I have already had to deal with services and config files with raspotify and shairport-sync.

Update 01-30-2024

Running raspotify and airupnp at the same time seems to break raspotify’s audio out. (It’s silent).

Update 02-05-2024

It turns out the speaker’s volume was really low when I tried it. Raspotify, shairport-sync and airupnp work fine together.