Setting up Shairport-sync as a service on Pi5 with DAC

[richardtheb]

Hello all I am doing a retrofit to an old radio using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W running the latest Raspbian and an Adafruit Speaker Bonnet. I've go it set up so the speaker works when you run Shairport-sync from the command line, but not when it runs as a service. The service journal includes this:

ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:999:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave
Sep 02 15:08:46 Aiwa shairport-sync[2122]: warning: alsa: error -524 ("Unknown error 524") opening alsa device "default".

Any thoughts? I'd be open for other ways to run it in the background without user intervention.

[mopioid]

Is this the systemd service that was created by the install script? Confirm that the user shairport-sync exists and is in the audio group by running groups shairport-sync.

[mikebrady]

Thanks for the post, but this should really really an Issue. I’m guessing that the problem is that you are using the full version of Raspbian, and hence using PipeWire. Please see here for a discussion. In the application you describe, it might be easiest to use the Lite version of Raspbian and avoid PipeWire and its complications completely. If you want to pursue the issue further, please open it as an Issue.

[richardtheb]

Thanks, will try raspbian lite and report back if still a problem as an issue.

[richardtheb]

Yes, switching to the lite version of Raspberry Pi OS fixed the problem. Still not quite sure what caused it, but you are probably right that something in the mess that is Linux audio was at fault.