I just made another ropieee roon endpoint with a raspberry pi. My old one had original Airplay and not Airplay 2. This new version has Airplay 2 which does not do lossless audio. Is there an old version of ropieee without Airplay 2 that can be downloaded somewhere? I use Airplay when not using Roon. Thanks in advance for your help.
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YeahâŚ
Iâm not into the Apple ecosystem (letâs say Iâm highly opionated 
), and I assumed that 2 would be an improvement. But youâre right, it is not wrt lossy vs lossless.
The only way we can solve this is by providing 2 binaries: one for Airplay 1 and another one for Airplay 2.
I need to think about thisâŚ
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Not all is lossy via Airplay 2 It depends on the app if it it streams lossless or not. Qobuz isnt lossy nor is Amazon music from my testing. If they choose to use the new low latency streaming it seems to revert it AAC if it uses the old system it doesnât. I guess if the endpoint is Airplay only it will only stream in legacy mode and send ALAC for all apps. Main app it affects seems to be Apple Music.
So⌠if you use Apple Music with Airplay 1 you get lossless, but lossy with Airplay 2?
Yes as itâs not using the legacy low latency stream. @wklie confirmed this with Lumin I believe as they donât support Airplay 2. Only to 44.1 obviously.
Ok then. This confirmes my earlier remark: if we want to âfixâ this we literally need 2 binaries (itâs not switchable at run-time unfortunately) and a switch to choose which one you want.
HmmmmâŚ
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If you stream using AirPlay 2 to more than one receiver it will be always lossy
No its not. I have had Qobuz app streaming to two airplay 2 units synced both lossless streams to each device. The bandwidth sent to both was that of flac not aac. I can see flac leveldata output from my phone to 1.7mb/s . Wiim pro reads Flac at 800mb/s, Sonos I cant see a readout but can check what its pulling from my network and its flac 800mb/s
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It seems it isnât true âŚ
Read the article properly as it is. I just tested again unless for some reason two streams of aac combin to make a bandwidth of 1.7mb/s. It the app uses non low latency it can and does stream at 44.1 ALAC and will do so when grouped.
Different flac file than last time but you can see what the phone is sending out, what bandwidth each zone is roughly getting plus the overheads of each one for other network activity.
What the wiim pro plus shows
Not using Qobuz app it doesnât
correct ⌠you can get multi-zone lossless to Airplay 2 receivers, when using an app like Qobuz (which uses legacy real-time Airplay streams)
see line 2 in the table towards the bottom of the Darko write-up
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Spockfish,
Airplay 1 with Apple Music will be lossless with Airplay 2 it will be lossy. It depends on the app and the receiver. Apparently Qobuz will not be lossy because the app still uses the Airplay 1 protocol. I know nothing about computers, so please forgive me if my terminology is not correct. If the app uses the Airplay 2 protocol and it is being sent to an Airplay 2 receiver, it will be lossy no matter what. If either the app or the receiver is Airplay 1, it will be lossless up to CD quality. That is my understanding at least. Several apps, namely Apple Music, use Airplay 2 protocol. An update with a button that lets you choose which one the ropieee is using would be amazing. I was honestly just hoping for a link to the last version of the software that was still using Airplay 1. Regardless, I think ropieee is a great, and thanks to everyone involved with it.
Simply speaking, that is correct. (Things can be different if the source is mac OS, and the user does system-level AirPlay instead of Apple Music app level AirPlay.)
For details, please refer to audiophilestyle.com reports and discussion of this issue.
Most of the time (for things I care about) AirPlay2 is lossy with common apps, although there are exceptions ((the way I see it) when AirPlay2 can be lossless 16/44.1.
Whether AirPlay2 is lossy or lossless is entirely controlled by the app, not the user.
AirPlay1 is guaranteed to be lossless 16/44.1, but some things donât work with AirPlay1 receiver. Some users also really like AirPlay2 multi-room feature, which require AirPlay2.
Recent models of Lumin support AirPlay 2.
I was able to make it work by selecting âforce to Airplay 1â in the services-airplay tab of ROPIEE.
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