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mpd and shairport

david2

May 10, 2014 22:26

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Hi,

I can use both mpd and shairport with my hifiberry DAC, as long as I don't have them running simultaneously.

If I try to start playing something with shairport while mpd is playing, then shairport shuts down with the message
FATAL: Alsa initialization failed: unable to open pcm device: Device or resource busy

It seems they can't share the device. I'm not an expert on ALSO configuration, but I've read that you can create a soft device that supports multiple sources and forwards the audio to a hardware device. So I set it up like this in /etc/asound.conf

pcm.dmixer  {
        type dmix
        ipc_key 313
        slave {
                pcm "hw:1,0"
                period_time 0
                period_size 1024
                buffer_size 4096
                rate 44100
        }
        bindings {
                0 0
                1 1
        }
}

When I try to use shairport with this device it shuts down with the following message:

ALSA lib pcm_direct.c:877:(snd1_pcm_direct_initialize_slave) slave plugin does not support mmap interleaved or mmap noninterleaved access
ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:1030:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to initialize slave
FATAL: Alsa initialization failed: unable to open pcm device: Invalid argument

Does anybody have any experience of running mpd and shairport together with hifiberry? How did you configure your devices?

Cheers
David R

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6 comments

• 0
  
  HiFiBerry team May 12, 2014 08:30

  Hi,
  
  check out Volumio. It uses both mpd and shairport.
  
  Best regards
  Daniel
• 0
  
  david2 May 13, 2014 05:23

  Thank you for your reply.
  
  I did however find a solution for the problem and I'll share it in case someone else is wondering. Shairport can be told to issue a command before playing. So by letting it run "mpc stop" it will stop the mpd playback and the sound card becomes available. No conflict.
• 0
  
  Benjamin Vandenbulcke May 26, 2014 19:57

  Hi, I am interested to know how you have made.
  
  First I had some problems with my hifiberry dac when I tried to play MPD and Shairport. When I tried it MPD crashed. It happened also with MpaD. So I have updated MPD and everything works with Mpad. Now the problem is with Shairport and it crashes when I play it when MPD is turning on.
  
  The only solution is to reboot my raspberry ...
  
  Can you tell me exactly how you have made (I am really not an expert with code) ? I have tried to to restart shairport in /etc/init.d with shairport restart or start but I have a fatal error...
  
  Thank you for the solution.
• 0
  
  Benjamin Vandenbulcke May 26, 2014 21:10

  What a bad joke. I was looking for a long time and I have finally found a solution here : http://volumio.org/forum/shairport-and-mpd-won-get-along-t332.html
  
  
• 0
  
  mokman May 31, 2014 10:47

  hi, i have the same problem, but no solution works for me.
  when i change "/etc/init.d/shairport" as suggested in the link above, then mpd is working fine but shairport cannot connect anymore.
  
  can you tell me how this worked out for you?
  i like to play both mpd and shairport simultaneusly.
  
  thanks!
• 0
  
  david2 June 01, 2014 15:03

  I settled with the solution to let shairport issue an "mpc stop" command before playing. You can't play music with mpd again until you've stopped the airplay stream. But it was the best solution I could find.