Version 4.2!

[mikebrady]

Hi everyone. Shairport Sync 4.2 is now available! It contains important bug fixes and some small enhancements that should make it a lot more reliable, for example, when playing Spotify material.

When you update to 4.2, you'll also need to update NQPTP to version 1.2.

[noelhibbard]

I'm getting this when connecting:
0.000290199 "audio_pa.c:222" *fatal error: failed to connect to the pulseaudio context -- the error message is "Connection refused".

Older builds work fine. I feel like this has happened before in the past where some code changes were not applied to the PA backend. I can't find my past report of this though.

[mikebrady]

Thanks for the report. I’ll take a look. Was there anything special about the environment? E.g. is it in a normal Linux environment or a Docker environment?

[noelhibbard]

I clone the shairport-sync repo and then modify the Docker file with sed to add curl and all the PA dependencies and then do a custom build. I need to look into the official PA build but haven't had a chance to look.

[mikebrady]

Many thanks for that. I'll do some digging...

[mikebrady]

Okay, so I've installed Shairport Sync and NQPTP in a Ubuntu 18.04 and a Ubuntu 20.04 and it works. The configuration command was:

$ ./configure --sysconfdir=/etc --with-pa --with-soxr --with-avahi --with-ssl=openssl --with-airplay-2

So maybe there's something about the Docker image.

[mikebrady]

Many thanks, @noelhibbard.

[noelhibbard]

I thought I responded to this but I don't see my response. Maybe I typed it but never actually posted it. The official docker image had the same issue. The solution was to set the server in the PA section of the shairport-sync.conf file. In the past sps would find the server using the PULSE_SERVER environment value so it didn't need to be set in the config file.

I suspect this isn't actually an sps thing but maybe something changed in the PA libraries that are in the docker image.

[noelhibbard]

Okay, digging some more, within the docker container if you open /etc/pulse/client.conf you will see this line:

default-server = unix:/tmp/pulseaudio.socket

That must be what was over writing my PULSE_SERVER environment variable. So yeah, it looks like my issue had nothing to do with SPS but a change to the environment in the newer docker image.

[mikebrady]

Thanks. So perhaps this could be associated with the transition from Alpine Linux from 3.12 to 3.17?

Does it mean that you've gotten the official Docker image working the way you'd expect?

[noelhibbard]

Thanks. So perhaps this could be associated with the transition from Alpine Linux from 3.12 to 3.17?

Does it mean that you've gotten the official Docker image working the way you'd expect?

Actually no, I think it was broken for me when PA support was added to the official image which added /etc/pulse/client.conf which was overwriting my PULSE_SERVER environment variable.

I removed the PULSE_SERVER env var from my docker-compose and then added a volume mount that looks like this:

volumes:
  - /var/run/pulse/native:/tmp/pulseaudio.socket

This fixes the issue without having to modify all my shairport-sync.conf files or make any changes to the official docker image.

I also updated/streamlined my instructions over here to reflect these changes.