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Long time Apple household, and I just bought what seems to be a bargain Android tablet - Samsung Galaxy Tab A9. Launched very late 2023. £170 on Samsung's site but you can pick up a 'non-EU' version on Amazon for just £82. Great - you have to select South Africa as the country when doing the setup but then it's fine.
My plan was to use it to replace an ancient iPad mini that's I use for audio streaming and home automation stuff.
Clearly I need to get my head around the operating system a bit, but I've installed BBC sounds, my HA app and tried out Spotify and the performance seems fine.
However, I need to stream to Airplay receivers and use Spotify connect and I naively thought that this was something that would be simple. I've downloaded a paid app called Airmusic but I'm not having much success with it. It can see my Yamaha amp (which has Spotify connect and Airplay) but Airmusic fails to connect. It did briefly see all my other Airplay devices (I've got a couple of little Belkin dongles and a few Apple TVs) and would stream to those. But now I've rebooted everything and it won't.
Spotify doesn't see it as a connect player either. Unless I start it playing on an apple device and then it will (for a while at least).
I thought Android was meant to be great and open and easy....
What's an airplay receiver?
What's an airplay receiver?
A device with Apple Airplay software - you send music from your (apple) phone to Apple TV/a little dedicated receiver/an AV amp with Airplay built it.
What's an airplay receiver?
A device with Apple Airplay software - you send music from your (apple) phone to Apple TV/a little dedicated receiver/an AV amp with Airplay built it.
If it's apple software on it, i can't it being happy connecting to an Android device. If these airplay receivers and apple TV are a core part of your setup that you can't bypass i'd send the Android tablet back and just replace your iPad with another iPad.
Android stuff will connect to virtually anything as they just tend to use bluetooth, but Apple stuff is very locked down and proprietary so that's probably the issue.
The issue is more likely the Apple side - as mentioned, Apple is very locked down (which is great news and awful news on equal measure).
At a complete guess, the air-doodahs use a proprietary connection method and that isn't available on Android.
To be honest, I only really need it to connect to my AV amp, and although it's 10 years old it does Airplay/Spotify Connect/would stream from media servers etc. I'd thought there would have been something it presented to the network that an Android device would deal with.
A cheap Google Chromecast Audio dongle plugged into my Yamaha amp is how I stream from my android phone...
I'm confused.
I have used several different brands of music streamers over the years and all have worked with both android and apple on the same system - i.e we have a Heos (Denon/Marantz) system at the moment for hifi and another for TV and you can connect to them using either Android or IOS - in fact we used to do it all the time as my wife had a Pixel and I have an iphone. I've also got a couple of wiim streamers upstairs and they connect to either. Obviously when the android unit is connecting neither of them are using airplay as thats apple specific and routes the signal through the phone/ipad - which is actually rubbish - airplay is a rubbish system, doesn't play gapless or lossless.
airplay is a rubbish system, doesn't play gapless or lossless.
My ears aren't good enough to worry about lossless and my sources (Spotify/BBC Sounds) aren't anyway. I've never noticed an issue with gapless (internet suggest was fixed)
airplay is a rubbish system, doesn't play gapless or lossless.
Is that Airplay per se or Apple Music?
Does this help?
https://9to5google.com/2021/01/04/how-to-use-airplay-android-airmusic/
Yes, I *think* I've got that working. How reliable it will be is another matter. The issue I was having was that the amp presented both Spotify connect and Airplay in the same way and trying to connect to the Spotify interface through Airmusic just broke it. Once I'd worked out which was which and could hide the 'bad' one it seems for now to be working. It's not 'critical listening' so I'm not worried about some notional loss of quality (it's mostly going to be used while cooking with extractor fan running)
The other thing I've found is something called 'fully kiosk' which lets you restrict the apps that appear so I can have it just offering the few I actually want to use on the tablet.
The other thing I've found is something called 'fully kiosk' which lets you restrict the apps that appear so I can have it just offering the few I actually want to use on the tablet.
Wallpanel is another option - think the free version has slightly more features than the free fully kiosk (eg wake screen on motion detection)
Edit - seems like it's not on the Google Play store at the mo but you can load the apk from the github repository
https://github.com/thetimewalker/wallpanel-android/releases
At a complete guess, the air-doodahs use a proprietary connection method and that isn't available on Android.
Yeah, AirPlay, which isn’t Bluetooth. Which is a proprietary format that Apple licenses. Just like MP3, actually. AirPlay uses a peer-to-peer protocol, usually over a wifi connection, but it can operate with Bluetooth - the problem there is BT just doesn’t have the bandwidth to handle streaming music that’s Losseless, which is why BT headphones and earphones can’t play Lossless files, which is why I use wired headphones and earphones exclusively for listening to music.