For a while I’ve been searching in vain for a UPnP/DLNA renderer (preferably free and lightweight) that will run on an Apple Silicon Mac (in my case a MacBook Pro running Ventura) so that my desktop running Audirvana Studio will stream to it and a DAC connected to it. I finally ran across a candidate in the past few days, tried it today, and it works!
So for anyone else who might want to turn an Apple Silicon Mac into a UPnP/DLNA endpoint that Audirvana can stream to, and who doesn’t want to spend money or run some huge app in the process, here’s what to do:
Install MacPorts.
Install rygel from MacPorts.
Install gstreamer1-gst-plugins-good from MacPorts.
Run rygel from the terminal of your MacOS computer (just type rygel).
That’s it, Audirvana should “see” the Mac as an available UPnP/DLNA renderer and be able to play to it or any connected DACs.
What is the logic in this? Why not just have a NAS serving Audirvana running on the MBP with the DAC attached…? What advantage are you gaining, if any?
It’s mainly for experimentation, to see whether or not any bugs that might appear with my usual UPnP/DLNA setup (Audirvāna on Windows via Ethernet to Linux minicomputer running upmpdcli to main system DAC) also occur with this setup (Audirvāna on Windows via WiFi to MacBook Pro running rygel to portable DAC). And it cost me exactly nothing, whereas the type of NAS I would want to build or buy would be in the $1000-$2000 range. I’ll eventually move to the NAS, but for now this works just fine. And I’d still be using UPnP/DLNA with the NAS, because that would be in my office, while the main system is in the living room.
Just got it working before my wife and I had to run off to a social engagement.
If I did take the MacBook out to the living room, connect it to the main system DAC, and listen to that setup, my expectation from prior experience (since I set up UPnP/DLNA on a couple of off the shelf Linux minicomputers before I got the microRendu) would be that the microRendu would be better. It was carefully designed for audio by someone I consider a very good designer, and I thought subjectively that it sounded better than the non-purpose-built computers I tried in that application.
I should be getting in a Fitlet3 with optical Ethernet input sometime in the not too distant future, and I’ll be interested to see how that compares to the microRendu.
Ah, a quick note: So far, can’t play DSD (DAC is DSD256-capable, DSD128 via DoP). Have tried DoP 1.0 and 1.1. PCM at 32/384 (device maximum PCM capability) works. Probably some rygel/plugin configuration I’m missing.
