AP2 on Windows WSL2

[noelhibbard]

Insider builds of Windows 10 have functioning audio out of the box. No trickery is needed. I haven't tried but you may be able to get SPS working on non-insider builds too by installing pulseaudio server in windows and then configuring WSL2 to point to it. But if you are on the insider dev build, these steps worked for me on Umbuntu in WSL2. Haven't looked into a way to keep it alive though.

Build/Install

sudo apt update
sudo apt-get install -y build-essential sudo git xmltoman autoconf automake libtool \
    libpopt-dev libconfig-dev libasound2-dev avahi-daemon libavahi-client-dev libssl-dev libsoxr-dev libglib2.0-dev \
    libplist-dev libsodium-dev libavutil-dev libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev uuid-dev libgcrypt-dev libpulse-dev \
    libmosquitto-dev pulseaudio pulseaudio-utils libsndfile1-dev

git clone https://github.com/mikebrady/nqptp.git ~/nqptp
cd ~/nqptp
autoreconf -fi
./configure
make
sudo make install

git clone https://github.com/mikebrady/alac.git ~/alac
cd ~/alac
autoreconf -fi
./configure
make
sudo make install

git clone https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync.git -b development ~/shairport-sync
cd ~/shairport-sync
autoreconf -fi
./configure --sysconfdir=/etc --with-soxr --with-ssl=openssl --with-avahi --with-airplay-2 --with-mqtt-client --with-pa --with-convolution
make -j
sudo make install

Run

sudo service dbus start
sudo service avahi-daemon start
sudo nqptp &
shairport-sync

[noelhibbard]

I forgot to add, you need to have WSL set to run on your host network. To do this:

• Run Hyper-V Manager
• Click "Virtual Switch Manager" on the right
• Click on the WSL switch
• Select "External Network" and then select the NIC you want it to bind to (you will need to stop all WSL instances first or else it will fail)

Now in the WSL instance run these commands so it will pick up an IP from DHCP on the host network:

sudo ip addr flush dev eth0
sudo dhclient eth0

[noelhibbard]

This utility will get systemd working in WSL so then you can run nqptp and shairport-sync as services in WSL just as you would a normal Linux distro.

https://github.com/arkane-systems/genie

[hyunjongL]

Are you still using this setup? How's the overhead of running this 24/7 on a workstation?

[noelhibbard]

I do not. I am back to the old Cygwin build of the AP1 version of shairport-sync.

[hyunjongL]

Thanks, I guess I might also stick to the Cygwin airplay1

[noelhibbard]

I just took a stab at this on Windows 11 23H2 and the process is easier now. Microsoft made it really easy to put WSL directly on your real network. You just need to make a VM switch that is a bridged to one of your network adapters. You can do this in powershell like this:

New-VMSwitch -Name "Bridge" -NetAdapterName (Get-NetAdapter|Sort ifIndex)[0].Name -AllowManagementOs $true

Then tell wsl to use bridge mode and bind it to the VM switch you just created like this:

[wsl2]
networkingMode=bridged
vmSwitch=Bridge

Then restart wsl:

wsl --shutdown

From this point you can build and run shairport-sync however you would natively using PulseAudio as the backend.

I also had to set this option in shairport-sync.conf:

resync_threshold_in_seconds=0

My guess is sync would not work at all.