Using the instructions from LifeHacker here I quickly turned some basic speakers into fancy AirPlay speakers that you usually have to pay Bose your life savings for.

Since I’ve got a working Raspberry Pi with Raspbian installed, and was trying it without an added sound card, I skipped to the ‘Install the Shairport AirPlay Emulator’ part. The instructions were simple to follow and I had Shairport running in no time.

I have DoubleTwist with AirTwist/AirPlay installed on my Android phone and, once I had Shairport running on my Pi, I was able to see it listed as ‘AirPi’ on DoubleTwist. My first attempt at streaming to my speakers didn’t go well. My Pi was only connected to my network via a USB wifi adaptor, which started blinking away as I tried to stream, playing my music in a very stuttering way. My flat is pretty small and the Pi wasn’t that far away from the wireless hub so it’s annoying that this didn’t work. My second attempt worked flawlessly. I plugged an ethernet cable into my Pi with speakers attached. A second or two after pressing play on DoubleTwist, my speakers were playing music from my phone and really not bad quality at all considering I hadn’t added a sound card to my Pi. I then tried my MacBook in another room streaming over AirPlay from iTunes and that worked brilliantly too.

A success for a wireless music system for essentially no £££s. The only disappointment has been having to connect via ethernet, making it less wireless than I would have hoped. I’d be interested to know if anyone’s managed to find a way to use a USB wifi adaptor when streaming music to a Pi.