libairptp and airptpd

libairptp is a library that implements the Precision Time Protocol in the way an AirPlay 2 sender like OwnTone needs. It is not an actual PTP clock.

libairptp is embedded in OwnTone, but needs to bind port PTP ports 319 and 320. If the host is running more than one instance of OwnTone, or if OwnTone doesn't have sufficient priviliges, this will not be possible. For that use case, this repository also has airptpd, a small PTP daemon which multiple and/or non-privilied instances of OwnTone can share.

airptpd is akin to nqptp and owes a lot to that project. The main difference between the two is that airptpd is designed to always become master clock, which a sender like OwnTone needs, while nqptp wants to become slave i.e., follow the time set by the sender.

Building

To build both libairptp and airptpd:

autoreconf -vi && ./configure --enable-daemon && make

To run airptpd (in background):

sudo ./daemon/airptpd

To run airptpd in foreground and verbose:

sudo ./daemon/airptpd -f -v

Check if working

To check if the daemon is working, build with:

./configure --enable-daemon --enable-tests && make && make check

Then run airptpd in foreground as described above, and in another terminal run ./tests/client.

Installing

Installing on systemd systems:

./configure --enable-daemon --enable-install-systemd && make
sudo make install

Start with systemctl start airptpd and check the status with systemctl status airptpd.