16 ms·

Smart Audio for the Smart Home

89 points by realityking 5y ago

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
Not sure how anyone could write this article without mentioning Squeezebox (later Logitech). AFAICT, it solved these problems before Sonos was even a thing. It's a tragedy that Logitech let the hardware side flounder, but there's still Squeezeplayer that can be run on anything that can run ... Perl.
- jcrawfordor 5y ago
  To be honest it's because I never owned a Squeezebox so I'm hesitant to comment on them too much. But it was indeed a really important part of the landscape, and sort of a parallel story to DLNA... Even better, as the community figured out at least partial interoperation between the two. Logitech had a lot more success on the hardware side than DLNA did, and really I think has responsibility for the brief reign of "internet radio" as a physical device.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  That timing doesn’t line up. Sonos hit the market first, and besides squeezebox didn’t solve the hard problems that Sonos solved in their first revision.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    According to Wikipedia, Sonos didn't reach market till 2005. Slimp3 was out in 2001 and Squeezebox in 2003.
monitron 5y ago
Is there an alternative? If I want to build a flexible, high-quality, open whole-house audio system that my whole family can use without cursing my name, do I have any options? It feels like there has to be a prosumer/low-end-professional product I can shoehorn into my house, kind of like how I've moved up from awful home network products to Ubiquiti gear over which I feel like I have some actual control (though their more recent UniFi products seem like a step backwards in that regard...)
- Cerium 5y ago
  Years ago I helped a friend install a CasaTunes [1] setup in their house. They already had speakers installed in the ceilings of each room, but they were routed to local closets with the intention of putting a system in each closet. We pulled cable to haul them all back to one closet and installed the CasaTunes system. The result was very nice, smart phone app control over the music in each room. It worked well for individual listening or to set the atmosphere for events. [1] https://www.casatunes.com/ https://www.casatunes.com/
- hammock 5y ago
  Spotify Connect. Even though the whole article is making a case for consumer-grade DLNA, towards the middle the author concedes: "No one needs DLNA because they use Spotify, and Spotify has worked commercial partnerships to get Spotify Cast support in their A/V devices." Except it's not open.
  - xolox 5y ago
    I operate a bunch of Raspberry Pi's that each run Raspotify and Snapclient. Raspotify is a wrapper for librespot, which enables Spotify Connect to "cast" from my (Android) mobile app to each Raspberry Pi (which are connected to speakers of course). The Snapclient instances connect to a central Snapserver instance that also runs librespot (again to enable Spotify Connect). So now I can cast to an individual Raspberry Pi (powered by Raspotify) to play music in a specific room, or I can cast to the central Raspberry Pi that runs Snapserver to get the same music in every connected room. While Spotify Connect is not open, librespot is open source, and it has been working fairly well for me for several years now. One thing to note is that librespot requires Spotify Premium.
- chaosharmonic 5y ago
  If you don't mind waiting until near-future for support for devices to actually support these, the group that's building out the Matter spec just confirmed yesterday[0] they're also working on casting functionality, and for audio in particular the Bluetooth ecosystem is slowly inching toward LE Audio. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/9/22824559/matter-tv-streaming-devices-smart-home-casting-protocol-support https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/9/22824559/matter-tv-stream...
pablobaz 5y ago
Im my experience Serviio was the only thing that made DNLA even half work and even with that it was flakey. https://serviio.org/ https://serviio.org/
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
dsr_ 5y ago
What I've got: The media server is a Debian x86 box with a big RAID on it. It has MP3 and FLAC rips of all the discs. That filesystem can be accessed via read-only NFS or CIFS or AFP. It is running: Owntone - MPD compatible, web interface, can stream to any client that can handle ChromeCast or AirPlay, including machines running shairport-sync. That's how you get multiroom party audio. minidlna - DLNA server, no interface, makes the library available to clients that only speak DLNA. That's a way of getting local play. Various devices around the house speak DLNA or mount the filesystem and present a local player.
- mr_sturd 5y ago
  Always had problems with choppiness with shairport-sync. Currently running MPD which feeds in to Snapcast for sending audio to clients.
  - dsr_ 5y ago
    In practice, it turns out that I just want music where I am, not the rest of the house, every day. This could be pandemics related.
  - Denatonium 5y ago
    A good alternative to get airplay working is to get a cheap used Airport Express second generation. Use or borrow an iPhone to configure it, and you can set it up to just act as an Airplay receiver. The airport express can connect via Ethernet and outputs either over analog audio or via mini-TOSLINK. It also has the advantage of being able to use Airplay 2. That's odd about the choppiness of shairport-sync; my setup is an old thin client running archlinux and shairport-sync. I have it hooked up via Ethernet and connected to my receiver with a cheap AliExpress USB>SPDIF adapter. I have shairport-sync configured to use ALSA directly. I've never had any issues with this setup.
messo 5y ago
What a great read! I have been playing with DLNA equipment lately and have found that, while extremely niche, is still alive and quite flexible for the few of us who like to curate local copies of our own music. I do sometimes pirate music, but I have found that buying used CDs at thrift-shops and at Discogs is cheap (and much more fun!) and lets me rip to FLAC with my own preferences.
- andrewzah 5y ago
  I've found discogs to be especially dangerous to my wallet. It's extremely tempting to pick up <$10 cds and rip them.
- lupinglade 5y ago
  Check out FireStream, it's a modern DLNA server for macOS: https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/app/firestream-upnp-dlna-media-server/id1005325119 https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/app/firestream-upnp-dlna-med...
alvarlagerlof 5y ago
Hoping for matter
cobbzilla 5y ago
This article is a really fun trip down memory lane: “Some of you may remember installing an IDE CD drive and having to connect the three-wire analogue audio output from the CD drive to the sound card.” And until today, I never knew the real “why”. Fascinating
jcrawfordor 5y ago
After this post, I wrote another about UPnP itself. If you are interested in the underlying network issues, you might like it. It also lead to an HN discussion that was more about DLNA than UPnP, I guess I'm not the only one that has a weird nostalgia for it. https://computer.rip/2021-11-26-no-u-pnp.html https://computer.rip/2021-11-26-no-u-pnp.html
aidenn0 5y ago
As TFA mentions, DLNA implementations were terrible. I had two DLNA devices and both of them could only play a very limited number of formats over compared to what they could play over USB. It took me days of fiddling with ffmpeg options to find the combination of codecs and container formats that would work. After all of that, the only format that worked on both of them was MPEG2 in a transport stream main-profile at 480p with MP3 audio. They both would play high-def content but there was no combination I found that would do high-def and worked on both of them. Meanwhile just about any H.264 muxed with just about any audio (even Vorbis) worked just fine on both on a USB stick.
- raffraffraff 5y ago
  Even software implementations are flakey. It took me ages to find a Goldilocks configuration for pulseaudio-dlna to gmediarender-resurrect (opus 96k send, 1s buffer on receive - everything else was unreliable)
kelnos 5y ago
Man, that brought back a bunch of memories. I worked at Netgear between 2004 and 2009, and we had a line of networked audio and video products that never really took off. At some point we got on the DLNA train, and the best part of that was that Intel and Microsoft would host interoperability events[0] in fun cities around the world, several times a year, and I got to go to many of them. (At that point the team was just me and one other guy, and he had a family, so it was easier for me, the single guy in his 20s, to go to these things.) The integrations on the hardware were buggy (at that time Netgear outsourced the software for these boxes to firms in southeast Asia, so we didn't have all that much control over the quality), Windows MCE was buggy, everything was buggy (the whole power management stuff mentioned in the article rang a bell; it was distinctly hard for our devices to reliably wake up a sleeping MCE box despite following the spec exactly). And the user experience was just terrible; it was hard to understand what you needed to do to get things set up properly, and the software was pretty clunky. [0] Basically you and your competitors would go stay at a hotel where a bunch of Intel and MS reps (and all your competitors) had booked a bunch of rooms, and you'd bring your hardware to a few different hotel rooms each day, hook things up, and make sure everything worked with each other. It was funny because this all took place in regular hotel rooms with beds and everything; they usually didn't book conference rooms or anything like that. They always scheduled a full week of this, but it would usually end up only taking 3 days or so, so I'd turn it into a long-weekend vacation in Paris, Berlin, Venice, etc.
beastman82 5y ago
> Also frankly all the DLNA products pretty much sucked but hey, I'm running on nostalgia. Great detail, great writing. Thanks for sharing.
sandreas 5y ago
I came across many audio "projects", but none of them was an out of the box solution that just worked... every project requires some fiddling and extensive config. Anyways, here are some links: https://volumio.com/ https://volumio.com/ https://moodeaudio.org/ https://moodeaudio.org/ https://www.picoreplayer.org/ https://www.picoreplayer.org/ https://www.pimusicbox.com/ https://www.pimusicbox.com/ https://www.runeaudio.com/ https://www.runeaudio.com/ https://www.max2play.com/ https://www.max2play.com/ (commercial) https://github.com/tuarrep/sounddrop https://github.com/tuarrep/sounddrop https://github.com/mariolukas/HydraPlay https://github.com/mariolukas/HydraPlay https://github.com/beejones/ZonePlayer https://github.com/beejones/ZonePlayer https://github.com/jaecksch/snapcastbox https://github.com/jaecksch/snapcastbox http://strobe.audio/ http://strobe.audio/ https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome https://github.com/MiczFlor/RPi-Jukebox-RFID https://github.com/MiczFlor/RPi-Jukebox-RFID https://github.com/skalavala/Multi-Room-Audio-Centralized-Audio-for-Home https://github.com/skalavala/Multi-Room-Audio-Centralized-Au... https://blog.platypush.tech/article/Build-your-open-source-multi-room-and-multi-provider-sound-server-with-Platypush-Mopidy-and-Snapcast https://blog.platypush.tech/article/Build-your-open-source-m... http://www.mysqueezebox.com/download http://www.mysqueezebox.com/download As DAC for Raspberry the IQaudio DAC Pro seems to be highly recommended. I personally own a Hifiberry.
nunez 5y ago
This article was riveting and invoked nostalgia I didn't even know I had. I forgot how badly I wanted to buy a TV tuner card so I could run MCE on my crappy tower at the time and being sad that I couldn't afford it (I was in high school). And I definitely remember hard-wiring old CD-ROM drives to good ol' Creative Sound Blasters and ripping at 1x. Some folks made a great business out of this at the time. I agree with the author: the state of consumer a/v tech is kind of sad. It is unfortunate that there really isn't a universally-supported open standard for _easily_ casting audio or video to a renderer (TV, projector) from a phone. Miracast is cool and works great but isn't built into iOS or Android and is a non-starter for non-technical folks. And the only affordable wireless multi-speaker tech is offered by Amazon (Echo) and Apple (AirPlay/HomePod) as loss-leaders to push more home assistants and collect more data. Sonos isn't exactly cheap and it also locks you into their system. Ideally, I'd like to buy wireless speakers from, say, Anker (okay, not great quality, but good enough to stash around the house) and drive them with Alexa or stream Spotify/Apple Music/$MEDIA_PLAYER through Miracast or whatever. But there's no money in that.
nshm 5y ago
Any of these with voice control? Preferably without internet connection.

89 points by realityking 5y ago

Not sure how anyone could write this article without mentioning Squeezebox (later Logitech). AFAICT, it solved these problems before Sonos was even a thing. It's a tragedy that Logitech let the hardware side flounder, but there's still Squeezeplayer that can be run on anything that can run ... Perl.

jcrawfordor 5y ago
To be honest it's because I never owned a Squeezebox so I'm hesitant to comment on them too much. But it was indeed a really important part of the landscape, and sort of a parallel story to DLNA... Even better, as the community figured out at least partial interoperation between the two. Logitech had a lot more success on the hardware side than DLNA did, and really I think has responsibility for the brief reign of "internet radio" as a physical device.
jeffbee 5y ago
That timing doesn’t line up. Sonos hit the market first, and besides squeezebox didn’t solve the hard problems that Sonos solved in their first revision.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  According to Wikipedia, Sonos didn't reach market till 2005. Slimp3 was out in 2001 and Squeezebox in 2003.

monitron 5y ago

Is there an alternative? If I want to build a flexible, high-quality, open whole-house audio system that my whole family can use without cursing my name, do I have any options? It feels like there has to be a prosumer/low-end-professional product I can shoehorn into my house, kind of like how I've moved up from awful home network products to Ubiquiti gear over which I feel like I have some actual control (though their more recent UniFi products seem like a step backwards in that regard...)

Cerium 5y ago
Years ago I helped a friend install a CasaTunes [1] setup in their house. They already had speakers installed in the ceilings of each room, but they were routed to local closets with the intention of putting a system in each closet. We pulled cable to haul them all back to one closet and installed the CasaTunes system. The result was very nice, smart phone app control over the music in each room. It worked well for individual listening or to set the atmosphere for events. [1] https://www.casatunes.com/ https://www.casatunes.com/
hammock 5y ago
Spotify Connect. Even though the whole article is making a case for consumer-grade DLNA, towards the middle the author concedes: "No one needs DLNA because they use Spotify, and Spotify has worked commercial partnerships to get Spotify Cast support in their A/V devices." Except it's not open.
- xolox 5y ago
  I operate a bunch of Raspberry Pi's that each run Raspotify and Snapclient. Raspotify is a wrapper for librespot, which enables Spotify Connect to "cast" from my (Android) mobile app to each Raspberry Pi (which are connected to speakers of course). The Snapclient instances connect to a central Snapserver instance that also runs librespot (again to enable Spotify Connect). So now I can cast to an individual Raspberry Pi (powered by Raspotify) to play music in a specific room, or I can cast to the central Raspberry Pi that runs Snapserver to get the same music in every connected room. While Spotify Connect is not open, librespot is open source, and it has been working fairly well for me for several years now. One thing to note is that librespot requires Spotify Premium.
chaosharmonic 5y ago
If you don't mind waiting until near-future for support for devices to actually support these, the group that's building out the Matter spec just confirmed yesterday[0] they're also working on casting functionality, and for audio in particular the Bluetooth ecosystem is slowly inching toward LE Audio. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/9/22824559/matter-tv-streaming-devices-smart-home-casting-protocol-support https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/9/22824559/matter-tv-stream...

pablobaz 5y ago

Im my experience Serviio was the only thing that made DNLA even half work and even with that it was flakey. https://serviio.org/ https://serviio.org/

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

dsr_ 5y ago

What I've got: The media server is a Debian x86 box with a big RAID on it. It has MP3 and FLAC rips of all the discs. That filesystem can be accessed via read-only NFS or CIFS or AFP. It is running: Owntone - MPD compatible, web interface, can stream to any client that can handle ChromeCast or AirPlay, including machines running shairport-sync. That's how you get multiroom party audio. minidlna - DLNA server, no interface, makes the library available to clients that only speak DLNA. That's a way of getting local play. Various devices around the house speak DLNA or mount the filesystem and present a local player.

mr_sturd 5y ago
Always had problems with choppiness with shairport-sync. Currently running MPD which feeds in to Snapcast for sending audio to clients.
- dsr_ 5y ago
  In practice, it turns out that I just want music where I am, not the rest of the house, every day. This could be pandemics related.
- Denatonium 5y ago
  A good alternative to get airplay working is to get a cheap used Airport Express second generation. Use or borrow an iPhone to configure it, and you can set it up to just act as an Airplay receiver. The airport express can connect via Ethernet and outputs either over analog audio or via mini-TOSLINK. It also has the advantage of being able to use Airplay 2. That's odd about the choppiness of shairport-sync; my setup is an old thin client running archlinux and shairport-sync. I have it hooked up via Ethernet and connected to my receiver with a cheap AliExpress USB>SPDIF adapter. I have shairport-sync configured to use ALSA directly. I've never had any issues with this setup.

messo 5y ago

What a great read! I have been playing with DLNA equipment lately and have found that, while extremely niche, is still alive and quite flexible for the few of us who like to curate local copies of our own music. I do sometimes pirate music, but I have found that buying used CDs at thrift-shops and at Discogs is cheap (and much more fun!) and lets me rip to FLAC with my own preferences.

andrewzah 5y ago
I've found discogs to be especially dangerous to my wallet. It's extremely tempting to pick up <$10 cds and rip them.
lupinglade 5y ago
Check out FireStream, it's a modern DLNA server for macOS: https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/app/firestream-upnp-dlna-media-server/id1005325119 https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/app/firestream-upnp-dlna-med...

alvarlagerlof 5y ago

Hoping for matter

cobbzilla 5y ago

This article is a really fun trip down memory lane: “Some of you may remember installing an IDE CD drive and having to connect the three-wire analogue audio output from the CD drive to the sound card.” And until today, I never knew the real “why”. Fascinating

jcrawfordor 5y ago

After this post, I wrote another about UPnP itself. If you are interested in the underlying network issues, you might like it. It also lead to an HN discussion that was more about DLNA than UPnP, I guess I'm not the only one that has a weird nostalgia for it. https://computer.rip/2021-11-26-no-u-pnp.html https://computer.rip/2021-11-26-no-u-pnp.html

aidenn0 5y ago

As TFA mentions, DLNA implementations were terrible. I had two DLNA devices and both of them could only play a very limited number of formats over compared to what they could play over USB. It took me days of fiddling with ffmpeg options to find the combination of codecs and container formats that would work. After all of that, the only format that worked on both of them was MPEG2 in a transport stream main-profile at 480p with MP3 audio. They both would play high-def content but there was no combination I found that would do high-def and worked on both of them. Meanwhile just about any H.264 muxed with just about any audio (even Vorbis) worked just fine on both on a USB stick.

raffraffraff 5y ago
Even software implementations are flakey. It took me ages to find a Goldilocks configuration for pulseaudio-dlna to gmediarender-resurrect (opus 96k send, 1s buffer on receive - everything else was unreliable)

kelnos 5y ago

Man, that brought back a bunch of memories. I worked at Netgear between 2004 and 2009, and we had a line of networked audio and video products that never really took off. At some point we got on the DLNA train, and the best part of that was that Intel and Microsoft would host interoperability events[0] in fun cities around the world, several times a year, and I got to go to many of them. (At that point the team was just me and one other guy, and he had a family, so it was easier for me, the single guy in his 20s, to go to these things.) The integrations on the hardware were buggy (at that time Netgear outsourced the software for these boxes to firms in southeast Asia, so we didn't have all that much control over the quality), Windows MCE was buggy, everything was buggy (the whole power management stuff mentioned in the article rang a bell; it was distinctly hard for our devices to reliably wake up a sleeping MCE box despite following the spec exactly). And the user experience was just terrible; it was hard to understand what you needed to do to get things set up properly, and the software was pretty clunky. [0] Basically you and your competitors would go stay at a hotel where a bunch of Intel and MS reps (and all your competitors) had booked a bunch of rooms, and you'd bring your hardware to a few different hotel rooms each day, hook things up, and make sure everything worked with each other. It was funny because this all took place in regular hotel rooms with beds and everything; they usually didn't book conference rooms or anything like that. They always scheduled a full week of this, but it would usually end up only taking 3 days or so, so I'd turn it into a long-weekend vacation in Paris, Berlin, Venice, etc.

beastman82 5y ago

> Also frankly all the DLNA products pretty much sucked but hey, I'm running on nostalgia. Great detail, great writing. Thanks for sharing.

sandreas 5y ago

I came across many audio "projects", but none of them was an out of the box solution that just worked... every project requires some fiddling and extensive config. Anyways, here are some links: https://volumio.com/ https://volumio.com/ https://moodeaudio.org/ https://moodeaudio.org/ https://www.picoreplayer.org/ https://www.picoreplayer.org/ https://www.pimusicbox.com/ https://www.pimusicbox.com/ https://www.runeaudio.com/ https://www.runeaudio.com/ https://www.max2play.com/ https://www.max2play.com/ (commercial) https://github.com/tuarrep/sounddrop https://github.com/tuarrep/sounddrop https://github.com/mariolukas/HydraPlay https://github.com/mariolukas/HydraPlay https://github.com/beejones/ZonePlayer https://github.com/beejones/ZonePlayer https://github.com/jaecksch/snapcastbox https://github.com/jaecksch/snapcastbox http://strobe.audio/ http://strobe.audio/ https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome https://github.com/MiczFlor/RPi-Jukebox-RFID https://github.com/MiczFlor/RPi-Jukebox-RFID https://github.com/skalavala/Multi-Room-Audio-Centralized-Audio-for-Home https://github.com/skalavala/Multi-Room-Audio-Centralized-Au... https://blog.platypush.tech/article/Build-your-open-source-multi-room-and-multi-provider-sound-server-with-Platypush-Mopidy-and-Snapcast https://blog.platypush.tech/article/Build-your-open-source-m... http://www.mysqueezebox.com/download http://www.mysqueezebox.com/download As DAC for Raspberry the IQaudio DAC Pro seems to be highly recommended. I personally own a Hifiberry.

nunez 5y ago

This article was riveting and invoked nostalgia I didn't even know I had. I forgot how badly I wanted to buy a TV tuner card so I could run MCE on my crappy tower at the time and being sad that I couldn't afford it (I was in high school). And I definitely remember hard-wiring old CD-ROM drives to good ol' Creative Sound Blasters and ripping at 1x. Some folks made a great business out of this at the time. I agree with the author: the state of consumer a/v tech is kind of sad. It is unfortunate that there really isn't a universally-supported open standard for _easily_ casting audio or video to a renderer (TV, projector) from a phone. Miracast is cool and works great but isn't built into iOS or Android and is a non-starter for non-technical folks. And the only affordable wireless multi-speaker tech is offered by Amazon (Echo) and Apple (AirPlay/HomePod) as loss-leaders to push more home assistants and collect more data. Sonos isn't exactly cheap and it also locks you into their system. Ideally, I'd like to buy wireless speakers from, say, Anker (okay, not great quality, but good enough to stash around the house) and drive them with Alexa or stream Spotify/Apple Music/$MEDIA_PLAYER through Miracast or whatever. But there's no money in that.

nshm 5y ago

Any of these with voice control? Preferably without internet connection.