Raspberry Pi is an awesome tiny cheap computer. It’s not super powerful but that’s not the point. It runs linux out of the box. Lots of work has been done on distros to strip out the unnecessary parts and ship with light weight programs.
One of the standout features of the Pi is it’s ability to play 1080p video. This naturally led hackers to tune Xbox Media Centre (XBMC) which was already working on linux to work on the Pi. There are a few different distros over at http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Raspberry_Pi I settled on Raspbmc mostly because of the name - shallow I know.
XBMC supports Apple’s Airplay protocol and can be quite easily configured as a headless receiver to give and old stereo Airplay support.
First you need a Raspberry Pi and the minimum accessories to get it going: SD Card, Micro USB power cable, keyboard, monitor. If you’re lost already checkout http://raspberrypi.org to get started. Then a set of speakers and an iDevice.
Follow the Raspbmc download and install instructions from http://www.raspbmc.com/download/ to install XBMC on to your SD Card.
Boot the Pi with the SD card, it takes a short while finishing the base install and updating.
When the Pi has finished installing it will land you on a blue dashboard, using the keyboard to navigate, move to the right and select the System > Settings menu.
- From the System > Audio output, set the Audio output to Analog.
- From Services > AirPlay, Allow XBMC to receive AirPlay content.
From your iDevice launch an audio player, I’m using Soma FM’s app but Music or any other App supporting AirPlay will work too.
If AirPlay is enabled on the Pi the apps on iPhone should display the AirPlay icon and you can select the “XBMC (raspbmc)” option and start streaming.
You can leave the monitor and keyboard plugged in and even stream video from YouTube, but I think there is something cool about having the minimal pieces of the puzzel and using it just for audio.
It should be possible to get this going wireless with a USB wifi dongle. This is next on my list but everything in this guide assumes wired network.
iTunes doesn’t seem to want to switch over to XBMC but iPhones and iPads are working great. And thanks to the massive range of Apps like SomaFM, rdio, Soundcloud, etc. there doesn’t seem to be a limit on choice.
Enjoy. J