I wanted to have the capability to play music from my phone wirelessly to my home. I already have an AirPort Express station that takes care of that. I recently purchased a BOSE Soundlink mini for my kitchen. The Bose speaker came out on top for its small size and its stunning sound quality. Its largest drawback though being that it is incompatible with AirPlay. The second drawback is that its AUX input can only be accessed directly on the speaker and not dock-like via its charging cradle.
Anyway I figured I could use my AirPort Express to hook up the BOSE speaker and since I already run cables to my stereo from my Mythbuntu server to my stereo I was looking into finding a way to use that as an AirPlay base.
Basically AirPlay is an encrypted protocol to allow vendor lock in. In this case Apple. The community managed to reverse engineer the RAOP protocol and so the key is available publicly on the net for example here.
The first solution I found was Shairport which essentially acts as a standalone daemon and is basically plug and play. I am not going to copy paste all the steps necessary as they are very self explanatory on the Shairport site.
A bit later I found that MythTV and Mythbuntu for that matter provide built in AirPlay support. You just need to download the key and have MythTV start the service at launch. All that is necessary is explained here and applies also to my Mythbuntu 12.04 or Ubuntu 12.04 for that matter running MythTV 0.25.
It remains to be seen if this still works when I update this spring to 14.04LTS.