Shairport Sync and Pipewire

[mikebrady]

Discussed in #1969

^{Originally posted by janstadt February 1, 2025}
Ive looked through a lot of posts here about how Pipewire and PulseAudio is problematic, but i want to be able to push audio out of one speaker from multiple sources. I use homeassistant to push notifications and airplay to play music. if they both use airplay, the session interruption isnt reliable enough for the setup and i typically get an error where the annoucement doesnt play or is truncated. Enter pipewire. I followed this post and had it working for a while, but now i keep getting this error:

Jan 31 18:24:53 the-kitchen shairport-sync[557]: warning: Shairport Sync's PipeWire backend can not get timing information from the PipeWire system. Is PipeWire running?

pipewire.service is running as a --user service as well as wireplumber.service.

I had working at one point, but now it no longer works on one of my devices (pi 3b with a hifiberry dac).

Version (built with pipewire):
4.3.5-AirPlay2-smi10-OpenSSL-Avahi-pw-soxr-metadata-mqtt-sysconfdir:/etc

Config

>> Display Config Start.

From "uname -a":
 Linux the-kitchen 6.6.62+rpt-rpi-v8 #1 SMP PREEMPT Debian 1:6.6.62-1+rpt1 (2024-11-25) aarch64 GNU/Linux

From /etc/os-release:
 Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm)

From /sys/firmware/devicetree/base/model:
 Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2

Shairport Sync Version String:
 4.3.5-AirPlay2-smi10-OpenSSL-Avahi-pw-soxr-metadata-mqtt-sysconfdir:/etc

Command Line:
 shairport-sync --displayConfig

Configuration File:
 /etc/shairport-sync.conf

Configuration File Settings:
 general : 
 {
   name = "The Kitchen";
   output_backend = "pw"; #i've tried with this line commented out as all i have is pw as an option and it shows pw (default)
 };
 sessioncontrol : 
 {
   allow_session_interruption = "yes";
 };
 pw : 
 {
 };

I use snapclient as my other protocol and that works still so i can get audio from there, but not from airplay. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[mikebrady]

Thanks for the post. It could be that Shairport Sync is not properly closing the pipewire backend properly so that it can't reopen. Or something. If you could find a quick and reliable way to cause it to misbehave, it would be a big help!

[janstadt]

Thanks for creating an issue @mikebrady. I wasnt sure what your desired workflow was so i started with a discussion. Im not 100% certain how to reproduce the issue, but all of my devices are logging that message as well as a memory allocation issue:

Jan 29 17:08:49 lucys-room kernel: __vm_enough_memory: pid: 7641, comm: shairport-sync, not enough memory for the allocation

The devices are still for the most part performing, but there certainly is something happening with pipewire and shairport-sync. I'll take a look and see if i can come up with other ideas.

[janstadt]

× shairport-sync.service - Shairport Sync - AirPlay Audio Receiver
     Loaded: loaded (/home/tc/.config/systemd/user/shairport-sync.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: failed (Result: signal) since Sun 2025-02-02 10:18:50 CST; 2min 42s ago
   Duration: 1w 1d 22h 38min 28.355s
    Process: 540 ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/shairport-sync --log-to-syslog (code=killed, signal=KILL)
   Main PID: 540 (code=killed, signal=KILL)
        CPU: 8h 25min 2.629s

Jan 24 11:40:22 gretas-room systemd[522]: Started shairport-sync.service - Shairport Sync - AirPlay Audio Receiver.
Jan 24 15:19:06 gretas-room shairport-sync[540]: warning: Shairport Sync's PipeWire backend can not get timing information from the PipeWire system. Is PipeWire running?
Jan 24 15:19:06 gretas-room shairport-sync[540]: warning: Shairport Sync's PipeWire backend can not get timing information from the PipeWire system. Is PipeWire running?
Jan 24 15:19:06 gretas-room shairport-sync[540]: warning: Shairport Sync's PipeWire backend can not get timing information from the PipeWire system. Is PipeWire running?
Jan 24 15:19:06 gretas-room shairport-sync[540]: warning: Shairport Sync's PipeWire backend can not get timing information from the PipeWire system. Is PipeWire running?
Feb 02 10:18:50 gretas-room systemd[522]: shairport-sync.service: Main process exited, code=killed, status=9/KILL
Feb 02 10:18:50 gretas-room systemd[522]: shairport-sync.service: Failed with result 'signal'.
Feb 02 10:18:50 gretas-room systemd[522]: shairport-sync.service: Consumed 8h 25min 2.629s CPU time.

Some additional information on another device with shairport that seems to have failed. Requires a restart in order for things to work. When i run systemctl --user restart shairport-sync.service i get:

tc@gretas-room:~ $ systemctl --user restart shairport-sync.service 
Failed to restart shairport-sync.service: Unit avahi-daemon.service not found.

Its running though (as a system level service albeit):

tc@gretas-room:~ $ sudo systemctl status avahi-daemon.service
● avahi-daemon.service - Avahi mDNS/DNS-SD Stack
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/avahi-daemon.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Fri 2025-01-24 11:40:18 CST; 1 week 1 day ago
TriggeredBy: ● avahi-daemon.socket
   Main PID: 351 (avahi-daemon)
     Status: "avahi-daemon 0.8 starting up."
      Tasks: 2 (limit: 179)
        CPU: 59min 52.803s
     CGroup: /system.slice/avahi-daemon.service
             ├─351 "avahi-daemon: running [gretas-room.local]"
             └─380 "avahi-daemon: chroot helper"

Jan 24 11:40:21 gretas-room avahi-daemon[351]: Joining mDNS multicast group on interface wlan0.IPv6 with address fe80::e794:efe3:181a:c33d.
Jan 24 11:40:21 gretas-room avahi-daemon[351]: New relevant interface wlan0.IPv6 for mDNS.
Jan 24 11:40:21 gretas-room avahi-daemon[351]: Registering new address record for fe80::e794:efe3:181a:c33d on wlan0.*.
Jan 24 11:40:21 gretas-room avahi-daemon[351]: Joining mDNS multicast group on interface wlan0.IPv4 with address 192.168.1.252.
Jan 24 11:40:21 gretas-room avahi-daemon[351]: New relevant interface wlan0.IPv4 for mDNS.
Jan 24 11:40:21 gretas-room avahi-daemon[351]: Registering new address record for 192.168.1.252 on wlan0.IPv4.
Jan 24 11:40:22 gretas-room avahi-daemon[351]: Leaving mDNS multicast group on interface wlan0.IPv6 with address fe80::e794:efe3:181a:c33d.
Jan 24 11:40:22 gretas-room avahi-daemon[351]: Joining mDNS multicast group on interface wlan0.IPv6 with address fdfa:1a1d:3f01:4948:966c:c3ea:2f34:6f0b.
Jan 24 11:40:22 gretas-room avahi-daemon[351]: Registering new address record for fdfa:1a1d:3f01:4948:966c:c3ea:2f34:6f0b on wlan0.*.
Jan 24 11:40:22 gretas-room avahi-daemon[351]: Withdrawing address record for fe80::e794:efe3:181a:c33d on wlan0.

The service

[Unit]
Description=Shairport Sync - AirPlay Audio Receiver
After=sound.target
Requires=avahi-daemon.service
After=avahi-daemon.service
Wants=network-online.target
After=network.target network-online.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/shairport-sync --log-to-syslog

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

After the restart the audio works, but i get a bunch more "Is Pipewire running?" logs from shairport-sync:

Feb 02 10:29:38 gretas-room shairport-sync[541]: warning: Shairport Sync's PipeWire backend can not get timing information from the PipeWire system. Is PipeWire running?
Feb 02 10:29:38 gretas-room shairport-sync[541]: warning: Shairport Sync's PipeWire backend can not get timing information from the PipeWire system. Is PipeWire running?
Feb 02 10:29:38 gretas-room shairport-sync[541]: warning: Shairport Sync's PipeWire backend can not get timing information from the PipeWire system. Is PipeWire running?
Feb 02 10:29:38 gretas-room shairport-sync[541]: warning: Shairport Sync's PipeWire backend can not get timing information from the PipeWire system. Is PipeWire running?
Feb 02 10:29:38 gretas-room shairport-sync[541]: warning: Shairport Sync's PipeWire backend can not get timing information from the PipeWire system. Is PipeWire running?
Feb 02 10:29:38 gretas-room shairport-sync[541]: warning: Shairport Sync's PipeWire backend can not get timing information from the PipeWire system. Is PipeWire running?
Feb 02 10:29:38 gretas-room shairport-sync[541]: warning: Shairport Sync's PipeWire backend can not get timing information from the PipeWire system. Is PipeWire running?
Feb 02 10:29:38 gretas-room shairport-sync[541]: warning: Shairport Sync's PipeWire backend can not get timing information from the PipeWire system. Is PipeWire running?
Feb 02 10:29:38 gretas-room shairport-sync[541]: warning: Shairport Sync's PipeWire backend can not get timing information from the PipeWire system. Is PipeWire running?
Feb 02 10:29:38 gretas-room shairport-sync[541]: warning: Shairport Sync's PipeWire backend can not get timing information from the PipeWire system. Is PipeWire running?

Im sharing different devices here but they're all configured identically with regard to shairport-sync/pipewire/etc.

[mikebrady]

Thanks. I’m way from machines just now, so it’ll be a few days before I can experiment.

But is it at all possible that the pipewire service has actually disappeared?