Hi, there. My name is Vladimir and I am about to load Volumio onto one of my three RaspPi’s. I am a mature adult who grew up with analog music, I am an electronic and signal processing engineer and an avid music lover. I would not call myself an audiophile as I think this assumes certain traits that I lack. I love good equipment and good high fidelity sound, but for me the music itself is the focus, not the analitical detail of a particular recording. I am more about discovering and enjoying music and less about comparing patch cords in a double blind listening tests.
I have one huge concern, however. I am currently using Apple Music as my streaming service and have not yet seen any signs of support for this service on Volumio. Am I missing something? It’s a great service streaming lossless and I really have grown to love it. do not like Spotify, Pandora and Amazon. Tried them. Don’t like them. Am I barking up the wrong tree here? Is Apple Music a dirty word in this community?
Thank you in advance.
Hi, I think the Volumio developers already expressed on this forum that it is not that they cannot or will not support Apple Music, but that to date Apple has not made available the necessary API to integrate the service in Volumio. If Apple would change their policy and would open up their service, I expect that Volumio will immediately adopt Apple Music (with their huge user base), like they did with their Spotify and Tidal (Connect) plugins. Until then, streaming Apple Music using the built in Airplay support may be a compromise: although this solution does not fully delegate the audio stream to the Volumio client, it does provide CD quality support to Apple Music subscribers.
Thank you for the reply. How do I use the built-in Airplay support? This is really disappointing and I hope Apple gets its act together on this soon. As for now I am trying to log into my free Spotify account using the Spotify plug-in and no-go. Do I need to do something special or the free account is not supported?
Thanks again!
With all my necessary respect…I am quite sure, Apple (as well as Amazon HD which is also not “supported”) sets their integration in Volumio very high on their to-do…
Airplay is switched on by default in Volumio, and may be detected by your Apple device as a target to stream to. On order to get Spotify going you must install both Spotify plugins, one for basic functionality and one to enable Spotify Connect. When you have done this, you need to log into your Spotify (Premium) account, from within the plugin. This does not work however with a free Spotify account. When you’ve done this you’re ready to go. Unfortunately, not much in life is for free…
I’m with you here, but at least from Apple’s perspective and their behaviour in the past I see no clue why they would have any interest in letting people escape from their ecosystem by handing off their music service to another party. Apple is primarily a hardware company and Apple Music is there to sell more iPhones, iPads and Macs. IMO, providing an API simply does not fit in their long term strategy.
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That’s exactly what I wanted to express. Apple and other “Very Big Players” do not care for niches. And I must say: From their view on their business they do absolutely right. There only here for the money 
But there are so many ways to hear music. Maybe not in the absolute comfort zone. And there will be always things we want but we do not get…
Apple Music works just fine on Android phones. So the theory that this service is only there to sell iPhones is flawed. Apple is as much a service company as it is a hardware company. They want more subscribers to their services. My guess as to why they do not release APIs is simple corporate stupidity. Yes, stupidity. It’s a thing and I’ve seen it.
In any case, thank you all for the discussion. I now understand the situation a little better. I do have a dedicated old iPhone I am using to stream Apple music and it’s fine that way. I was just looking to use up one of my multiple RasPi devices for a useful purpose. I can certainly use it to stream music from my collection of ripped CDs that lives on my home network drive. It’s not the same as streaming a music service, but it’s something.
As for things not being free, I am well aware of it and not at all suggesting they should be. It is just that I am already paying for Apple Music and I am fairly happy with it. It’s lossless and the catalog of available music is vast. It works very well with my phones and that is where I listen most. In my cars, headphones, my shop (via bluetooth, but it’s a noisy shop), etc. A dedicated streamer in my home hi-fi system is actually a secondary source for me. I rarely get to sit down and listen to that system anymore, even though it’s a very nice system. As I said, I can plug in an old iPhone into it and it works great. The DAC on the iPhone is actually very good and way better than the stock one on the RasPi. I would need to get a DAC hat for Raspi to even come close to an old iPhone.
Apple Music works on Android phones, so I am not sure you are correct about your assumption of Apple being strictly a hardware company. They are most certainly a service company as well and looking to get more subscribers in that realm.
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IHMO, the problem is that Apple, Amazon, Spotify and other streaming platform does not provides API for system such as Linux. They are of course able to provide app for iOS, Android or windows, but with no material (as Qobuz or Tidal) there is no “official” way of using it on Volumio.
I think it would get them more subscribers if they supported open source platforms, but what do I know? I haven’t been inside an office job in over a decade…
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Sure they would, and they have most likely thought about it and came to an conclusion that the possible gains of doing so does not justify the cost of it.
- Someone needs to design the API
- It needs to be secure
- possible more servers.
- Maintenance
- Support of some kind for it.
- (Most likely something i don’t even think about)
It’s not really free to make such thing.
Qobuz and Tidal in other hand, kind of had to publish API’s, they need the niche market to make any success, where as Apple and Google for example already have such successful ecosystems that they do not need to bother with that to be successful.