SONOS speakers are a great system. If you´re into multiroom audio it was one of the first solutions for this use case. About 10 years ago (in 2012) I came across the system and fell in love with it. Went all in and bought a bunch of speakers.
Sometimes down the line SONOS decided to drop airplay support for their first generation speakers. This was mainly to push users to use SONOS 2 (and of course pay for the upgrades).
This was a major turn off for me, until I discovered you can install a bridge on a raspberry.
Things you need
- SONOS system
- RaspberryPI (whatever generation will work)
- Access to the PI (either via ssh or vnc)
- airconnect airconnect
Steps to install SONOS airplay bridge
- Connect to your raspberry
- Install the AirConnect excecuteable to /opt
sudo mkdir /opt/airconnect
cd /opt/airconnect
sudo wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/philippe44/AirConnect/master/bin/airupnp-arm
sudo chmod +x airupnp-arm
- ensure the system starts the service
systemd is responsible for starting so we need to add config
cd /etc/systemd/system
sudo touch airupnp.service
sudo vi airupnp.service
- SystemD config
[Unit]
Description=AirUPnP bridge
After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target
[Service]
ExecStart=/opt/airconnect/airupnp-arm -l 1000:2000 -Z
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=30
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
- Activate and start the service
sudo systemctl enable airupnp.service
sudo service airupnp start
If everything worked you now should be able to stream via airplay from any connected Apple Device on the network.