I'm delightedly listening to a lossless file which I managed to get from a PC running Ubuntu to my Playmaker without any major messing around. This is not a perfect solution, as you'll see below, but it makes it easy to get things working.
The round-about route to victory
Short version: what you need is GUPnP which is a nice, well-supported piece of Free Software which speaks DLNA. It acts as a PC-based remote control for your media server and Playmaker.
For the media server, you need the non-Free Skifta, which is free-as-in-beer but doesn't come with source code. Some people care about this, some don't. I'll live. You just download and run Skifta, and it takes your various directories with music and makes them visible to GUPnP.
Result: two easy-to-install well-behaved apps work together to give you a basic browse-and-play interface on your Linux PC. GUPnP gives you the interface, and Skifta handles the media. You can also install Skifta on your phone and use it as a control from there, but I don't like the UI on that approach. I tried it. It's a pain.
Why you have to go the long way around
The Airplay / Playmaker thing is a deadend on Ubuntu - the iTunes audio interface is dead on Ubuntu. You can install all the software - pavucontrol, pulseaudio-module-raop, paprefs. Net result: nothing, it doesn't work. Your Airplay device, in this case the Playmaker, shows up in the Sound control panel, and when you send audio to it, nothing happens. The audio app usually pauses and waits to start streaming, and then never moves. Best guess why is that RAOP is out of date, and devices expect RAOP2 which doesn't work as yet.
It's not likely to get fixed any time soon - DLNA seems like it's where the development effort is, so here we are.
Quick thought for any Bang & Olufsen staff reading this
Support Linux. Here's why:
1) It's not hard - release the source code, offer a little encouragement, and people will soon-enough have the Playmaker running custom hacked operating systems that make it do what they want it to do. It probably runs Linux already, truth be told, so why not?
2) B&O is hurting financially, and not that many people have £4000 to blow on audio equipment - I certainly don't, I bought used at MoreThanAV. However, the BeoLab 3 is pretty much the perfect nerd audio system - technical, precise, clever, doesn't take up much space, you can lug it to Burning Man in a pelican case etc. The aesthetics and performance would work well for the nerd community, and they control an increasingly large percentage of the market place. For guys pulling down £80k+ a year on average, B&O is a plausible choice.
3) Innovation happens at the edges. Give people the source for the Playmaker, and let them experiment. You never know what kinds of innovation would happen, and all of that is free R&D.
The polished aesthetic is great for people that have no idea of how technology works, and little interest. But Apple's day is yesterday. Android is now arguably better than iOS in a whole range of ways, and that trend is only going to continue.
Time for a change of direction, maybe? Talk to a broader community, help them to support their own toys on your hardware, get something interesting to happen?
Anyway, just a suggestion, but there are a lot of hackers in the world, and they all like music. Worth a try.
