Installing Shairport Sync with Cygwin on Windows 10.

Recently I’ve written about installing Shairport Sync on MacOS with homebrew. Today I will show how to install Shairport Sync on your Windows 10 PC using Cygwin.

Installing Cygwin

Firstly, install Cygwin by downloading and running setup-x86_64.exe form the official website.

You can use default preferences if you choose to, or specify custom install directory and a directory to save downloaded package files to. During the install process, you will have to pick the download site. I have chosen one provided by University of Waterloo since it’s located in Canada.

Next, the installer would let you pick any additional packages to install. This can be ignored since we will install all additional packages later. When the installation is finished, copy setup-x86_64.exe file you’ve downloaded and place it in the directory where you’ve installed cygwin. I my example it would be D:/Apps/cygwin64.

Installing additional Cygwin packages

As discussed on the official Shairport Sync page, we will need to install additional Cygwin packages to compile the app.

Doing so is quite simple. Open command prompt and navigate to your Cygwin installation directory. In my example, it would be D:/Apps/cygwin64:

C:\Users\Nicholas> d:
D:\> cd Apps\cygwin64

Next, install all of the required packages:

D:\Apps\cygwin64> setup-x86_64.exe -q -P autoconf -P automake -P clang -P libdaemon-devel -P popt-devel -P make -P libao-devel -P openssl-devel -P libtool -P git -P wget -P flex -P bison

Installing libconfig and Shairport Sync

After installing additional packages, we will need to switch from cmd to Cygwin, which can be done by running Cygwin.bat:

D:\Apps\cygwin64> cygwin.bat

Install libconfig using the below commands one after another:

$ git clone https://github.com/hyperrealm/libconfig.git
$ cd libconfig
$ autoreconf -fi
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install
$ cd ..

Finally, install Shairport-Sync using the below commands one after another:

$ git clone https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync.git
$ cd shairport-sync
$ autoreconf -fi
$ PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig ./configure --with-ao --with-ssl=openssl --with-tinysvcmdns
$ make
$ make install

Done! You will have a shairport-sync.exe file in \home\user\shairport-sync directory of Cygwin. To start Shairport Sync, launch Cygwin64 Terminal from start menu and simply execute:

$ shairport-sync

And just like that, we are in business :) I hope this has been informative and thanks for reading.