Session Interruption Help

[janstadt]

I have a number of picoreplayers devices running on zero w2's and its been great. I had mostly been using squeezelite protocol for playback via Music-Assistant (originally used LMS). Our house is primarily an apple house and my family would prefer to use Airplay to cast to the devices, so i hav enabled shairport-sync and its working fine.

My issue is that while playing music from a phone via airplay, if i send the pi a request directly from another device or even via LMS/Music-Assistant (announcements or new music from Music Assistant/LMS), the current session stops (i had to enable session interruption for this to work), but the audio from the secondary device doesnt play anything until roughly 40 seconds later. Sometimes never.

I've tried tweaking some timeout settings in shairport-sync but it hasnt helped much. Same goes if i am playing from an iphone and my wife tries to play music to the same device. It stops the existing session which is nice, but then an error shows up on her phone and she has to re-pair via airplay. I dont know if this is the same issue as when LMS/MASS sends audio (over airplay) to the device but it seems similar. 

Basically i am curious if anyone has configured shairport to accept audio from multiple sources and have them play immediately by killing the existing session? I want to send notifications and other automations through speakers via music-assistant/homeassistant as well as have shairport-sync accept multiple sessions and do FIFO for sessions and allow the last session request win (if that makes sense?). Last one wins essentially and have it play immediately. TIA

[janstadt]

Update: I moved from picoreplayer to moode on one of my devices and am getting better session interruption performance with the latest version of shairport-sync so thats good. The final piece to the puzzle is getting mqtt remote control working which i understand is still broken due to iOS app settings.

[mikebrady]

Thanks for the question. I am a bit mystified about why there should be such a long delay, TBH. Shairport Sync should be able to switch in a few seconds. Perhaps the Moode guys might be able to shed some light…

[janstadt]

Thanks for the reply @mikebrady. Do you have a preferred setup for pi's? DietPi? Picoreplayer? moode? volumio? Any other os'es that i might have missed testing? Im willing to test things out with a different OS to see if i can make the latency better. With moode its been the best (shortest latency) so far. pcp runs shairport-sync 4.1.1 and i havent quite figured out how to install a newer version on there.