World’s stupidest AirPlay speaker
Sometimes the designers of electronic equipment make truly baffling design choices. Here is a low cost, neat-looking AirPlay speaker I bought very cheaply online.
The speaker itself works well enough, but is ruined by some bizarre software choices:
It puts itself to sleep after only 5 minutes of idle time - and disappears from your network
You then have to physically press the power button on the back to wake it up again
After you wake it up, it reconnects to wifi and emits a loud, shrill, high-frequency “BEEP”.
Even a quiet “ding” would be superfluous (as there’s a blue light that also indicates wifi connection) and quite why it needs to sleep after only 5 minutes is beyond me, as this renders the convenience of Airplay redundant. I can’t believe it is supposed to work this way. Perhaps it’s running some sort of testing firmware?
Anyway, I think I have eventually found a way to stop the stupid thing dozing off. Pinging it doesn’t work, connecting to the internal web server doesn’t work. The only thing that seems to stop it falling asleep is to stream music at it. So I created a 1 second, silent mp3 file and tried streaming that every minute. Amazingly, this seems to work! An added bonus is that this doesn’t seem to get in the way of normal use i.e. it’ll just ignore the mp3 “pings” if it’s already playing something.
The challenge is to automate this in a script. On the face of it, this should be simple enough. For example, you can use curl to AirPlay an .mp3 file over RTSP like this:
curl -s -X PUT --data-binary silent.mp3 -H 'Connection: keep-alive' -H 'User-Agent: MediaControl/1.0' -H 'X-Apple-Transition: None' -H 'Content-Type:' -H 'Accept:' -H 'Host:' -H 'Expect:' rtsp://<hostname>.local:<port>
Just replace <hostname> and <port> with those of the speaker. Easy enough? Well, it would be, only the $@*! thing changes the listening port every half hour or so for no apparent reason whatsoever!
So, for my next trick: how on earth to find out what port it is listening on? You can use Bonjour to query it, but unfortunately the command line tool dns-sd is hopeless for scripting purposes.
Eventually I found a way to do it in Python using the pybonjour module. I cobbled together a grotty Python script to return the current port and then piped this into the command line above. It works! Yay! Unfortunately the script is too horrific/embarrassing to post here, but if I ever get around to cleaning it up then I guess I might put it up.
Total waste of time, shoulda bought a proper speaker in the first place. :-P
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