Choppy sound on MPD + Airplay, working pulseaudio

Question

My current setup is mpd server on a RPi connected via pulseaudio to an airport express sink which in turn is connected to my receiver/amp as described in Redirect audio to another AirPlay device

In this setup I get choppy sound coming from the receiver. However, I have troubleshooted the problem to mpd because of the following:

1) It is not a pulseaudio + raop since running ffmpeg -i my-audio-file.mp3 -f pulse "my-sink.local" does play well through the receiver via airplay.

2) It is not an issue of connectivity of mpd since connecting to mpd either with mpc locally or a client from a different computer plays well when mpd is configured to use the alsa sink and a headset on the RPi.

I suppose it is some form of buffering on mpd that is conflicting with airplay/raop but I do not know where to look, any help will be appreciated.

Answer 1

As indicated in https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio/Troubleshooting

Use

load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0

in /etc/pulse/default.pa. This fixes the choppy audio

Answer 2

Spent some time trying to configure Airplay through Raop/PulseAudio on the new Raspberry Pi 3 using Raspbian Jessie with very little success. I would highly recommend forked-daapd:

This is a much updated version of the original forked-daapd 0.19, a Linux/FreeBSD DAAP (iTunes) media server with support for AirPlay devices, Apple Remote (and compatibles), MPD, Spotify, mp3 streaming and internet radio.

Install was very straightforward and I had the whole thing up and running in about 10 minutes. Here are the install instructions as detailed here:

1a. If you use Jessie then add this line to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://www.gyfgafguf.dk/raspbian jessie/armhf/
or
1b. If you use Wheezy then add this line to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://www.gyfgafguf.dk/raspbian wheezy-backports/armhf/
2. Run sudo apt-get update and then sudo apt-get install forked-daapd
3. Edit the config file /etc/forked-daapd.conf and (re)start the server with sudo /etc/init.d/forked-daapd restart

Optional - how to add support for Spotify:
1. Add deb http://apt.mopidy.com/ stable main contrib non-free to /etc/apt/sources.list
2. Run sudo apt-get update and then sudo apt-get install libspotify-dev
3. Restart forked-daapd and enter credentials as described in the instructions.
4. Check the log to see how it is working. It should start loading your playlists.