Sending music to an Airport Express from Linux

Where I am living, there is an Apple Airport Express with a nice set of speakers connected to it. I am running Fedora Linux, though, and am not interested in running iTunes in Wine to use its AirTunes. I looked around and found the seemingly inactive raop-play software to send my music from within Linux to the Airport Express. However, that didn't work for me.

Today I did some googling and found PulseAudio ticket 69 for adding support for setting an Airport Express as an audio sink. This feature isn't available by default in Fedora, though. After some poking around, I figured out what package I needed by doing

yum whatprovides /usr/lib/pulse-0.9.21/modules/module-raop-discover.so

to find out that I needed the pulseaudio-module-zeroconf package.

So, after doing a quick

yum install pulseaudio-module-zeroconf

and restarting pulseaudio with

pulseaudio -k

I discovered that the module still wasn't loaded, requiring me to do a quick

pactl load-module module-raop-discover

After which I checked my audio preferences again (right clicked on the slider to find them) and found under Output a new AirPort sink to feed my audio into. Hooray! Now to find out how to have it automatically loaded, preferably without a bash configuration.