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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 h

• 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...
  • gnicholas 5y ago
    > Matter TV, as we’ll call it for wont of an official name, will allow control of a television’s core functions — volume up / down, changing the channel, controlling inputs and outputs, and switching between HDMI ports. This is the key for me. There are plenty of ways to play audio over bluetooth, but not enough ways to control which speakers are active from my phone.
• dsr_ 5y ago
  Do you want the same music everywhere, or do you want each person to be able to play their own music where they are? Almost all the installable-box systems assume the first: you want the same music in your office, the living room, your bedroom simultaneously, and if your husband picks up a controller and changes it to what he likes, that's what everybody gets. If you want the second, you need a music server that makes a filesystem full of FLAC and MP3 available via NFS or CIFS or DLNA, and a bunch of clients with speakers around that house that can be used to select music and play it. Those clients can be Raspberry Pi based units that look as good as you're willing to pay for, and the whole thing will take you one afternoon.
• dementik 5y ago
  Squeezebox (Logitech Media Server) with material-ui plugin is something which happens to work quite well. Family members are happy as well. Syncs perfectly on multiroom setup, supports Spotify, works with Home Assistant and has at least enough device choices for playback.
  • malermeister 5y ago
    +1 to LMS + material skin! Protip: You can embed the lms webui in the Home assistant frontend, so you have all your home automation in one place!
  • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    Yay for Squeezebox. That said, the network performance of my units is wildly unpredictable and I'm planning to replace them all with RPi + hifiberry + squeezeplayer. It's been 20+ years, though!
    • mturmon 5y ago
      My wireless units sometimes lose network connectivity and have to be restarted, but the wired ones are troublefree.
  • mturmon 5y ago
    My server runs an earlier version of MacOS, which could be the cause of the Spotify extension to my several Squeezeboxes not working. Are you using “Spotty” successfully?
    • dementik 5y ago
      Yep, Spotty is working for me flawlessly. Funny and nice feature is that I can play different tracks on different squeezeboxes via one Spotify account. Running server on Ubuntu 20.04.
• acidburnNSA 5y ago
  * Server running mopidy [1] with all your audio loaded up on it and connected to Spotify. * Install the Iris plugin for UI [2] on server * Install snapcast [3] server on the audio server and snapcast client on raspberry pi's near all stereos you want to pipe audio into * Put bookmarks to the Iris page on all family member's phone home screens. * Add the snapdroid app [4] to each phone so people can adjust volume of each stereo and also play audio on their phone (or anything it's bluetoothed into) [1] https://mopidy.com/ https://mopidy.com/ [2] https://mopidy.com/ext/iris/ https://mopidy.com/ext/iris/ [3] https://github.com/badaix/snapcast https://github.com/badaix/snapcast [4] https://github.com/badaix/snapdroid https://github.com/badaix/snapdroid
  • acjohnson55 5y ago
    Thanks for sharing. I would love to see an in depth description of a setup like this. One big question, can you cast audio to this system from a phone and then redirect it to different outputs? Or just cast directly to outputs?
  • mr_sturd 5y ago
    I believe Iris can talk to the Snap server directly for volume control, when you've configured it in the UI.
    • acidburnNSA 5y ago
      true. The snapdroid app can also stream audio to the phone.
• snthd 5y ago
  Nymphcast looks promising. Otherwise for the sync there's stuff built around snapcast. It has the fundamental limitation that it's a dumb pipe. You can control the volume and mute it, but a pause only happens when the snapcast gets to the silent "paused" part of the buffer. The sync does work very well though. Maybe something will be possible with pipewire?
• cloudking 5y ago
  I priced out a Sonos system for multi room audio and it was over $6k USD. Decided to build my own system with a combination of: - Sony audio receivers for each room - Chromecasts - HDMI to RCA adapters - Harmony Pro IR controller - Raspberry PI with Home Assistant I set up the Chromecasts with audio groups for the whole house and different areas. I configured the Home Assistant to control power for the receivers through the IR controller when they are cast to. (You could probably skip the IR setup and adapters with more expensive HDMI receivers, the stereo receivers were only $150 each) Anyone on the WiFi can easily cast audio from any music app to any room, area or the whole house without having to install or configure anything. Works with Android and iOS. Whole set up cost less than $2k.
  • cmclaughlin 5y ago
    Nice setup! It’s a bummer Google discontinued Chromecast Audio. I still have three of them and love them. The new Nest Speakers don’t have audio out, so there no integration with nicer audio equipment.
    • cloudking 5y ago
      Thanks! Yeah that is a shame, but this set up with regular Chromecasts works fine. The HDMI to RCA converter can be used to just output the audio.
  • raffraffraff 5y ago
    Instead of the Chromecast Audio I got a Pi 4 and Startech 7.1 usb audio. With Pulseaudio you can remap channels, so I have 5.1 going to my old Yamaha (which lacks hdmi) and 2 channels going to a Denon that drives ceiling speakers in the adjoining kitchen. This handles movies, and has played everything up to Atmos, downmixed to 5.1. Also upmixes stereo to 5.1, sending <150Hz to the sub channel. It plays the same audio to both amps because it's open-plan, but the amps are separate so I can turn one down or off, or change to another source. The Pi runs gmediarender-resurrect (a DLNA receiver) so I can fling audio from my laptop (pulseaudio-dlna) or phone (bubble upnp).
• andrewmg 5y ago
  What you’re looking for is Roon.
• bluGill 5y ago
  I've been buying arylic https://www.arylic.com/ https://www.arylic.com/ devices to see if i like them. You build them into your hardware, so more flexible than most. You are stuck with their system though, it can be controlled via homeassistant (or so it is claimed, I haven't tried that ) but you can't connect it to your computer via network which would be nice as I have a good audio interface already (for xlr microphones) and just want to extend that on. There are diy solutions, but I don't have time to play anymore, I just want it to work. I also want it to look finished, not like a rats nest of wires.
• micromacrofoot 5y ago
  I ran speaker wire through my walls when i removed coax, every room can toggle between whole house audio or plug in to play whatever they want… it’s dumb but no one ever asks me to troubleshoot it… most “smart” hardware has such garbage software it isn’t even worth it. This system was cheap and will probably outlive me
• simplyaccont 5y ago
  it depends on do you plan to use ceiling/wall speakers wired to central location or not ? if yes, you ideally need multi-zone amplifier to actually drive speakers with built-in or separate mixer (allows you to have multiple inputs and assign them to different outputs at will). Something like Dayton Audio DAX88 will be probably cheapest solution for such setup, while allowing individual control over each speaker (there are optional keypads for control, mobile apps and dlna support as input). If you to to higher end, you can get even systems with integrated intercoms in keypads and touchscreens for each speaker zone. Or if you go with bookshelfs that are independently powered, well, there were a bunch of options described here
  • gnicholas 5y ago
    I recently moved into a home that has speakers in the ceiling in 4 different rooms, with all the cables running up to an upstairs (inconveniently-located) media closet. I can't figure out what to do with this setup. I'd like to be able to play music/podcasts from my phone into various rooms, and I'd only rarely want simultaneous audio in multiple rooms. One thing I've considered is getting several cheap mini receivers and hooking each one up to a Belkin AirPlay adapter. There also seem to be some $50-ish bluetooth-enabled receivers, which would allow for the same functionality, except without the ability to play in multiple rooms simultaneously. Has anyone dealt with a similar situation?
    • simplyaccont 5y ago
      this is what i deal with. only 6 rooms your best bet dax88 or dax66 (older) if you want flexibility. alternative is passive speaker selector like Pyle PSPVC6 and Pyle PDA20 mini amp/bt receiver hooked up to audio source. alternatively you can try instead of PDA20 Amazon Link Amp (it weaker, not sure if it can drive speakers in 4 rooms) you can try to look through monoprice/pyle sites, they may have something different for 4 rooms - there are more options than for 6 rooms. But in general, if you want some remote control (volume, select inputs/output), it quickly jumps ~1k.
      • gnicholas 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
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• raffraffraff 5y ago
  I'm only half joking with this low-tech solution: https://www.amazon.com/Retekess-Transmitter-Microphone-Translation-Receivers/dp/B07W7QM1NW?ref_=ast_sto_dp https://www.amazon.com/Retekess-Transmitter-Microphone-Trans... This extremely low-tech solution would give you 10 room audio from a single source (like MPD, but it could be anything at all since you just plug a line-in - your old turntable for example). If the transmitter isn't up to snuff for your huge abode, you could get a slightly larger transmitter that does about 900ft. With 3 transmitters on different frequencies and say 5 receivers dotted throughout the house, you could tune a room to "Dad FM" or "WTF is that racket FM" I seriously considered this for laughs but didn't follow through.
• kelnos 5y ago
  I've been wanting to do something like this for a while, but never got around to it. What I'd probably do is get a bunch of Raspberry Pis, buy HiFiBerry HATs for all of them, connect speakers, and install snapcast (https://github.com/badaix/snapcast https://github.com/badaix/snapcast). But I'd still be afraid that it'd be fiddly and require too much maintenance. I really don't think there's anything commercial you can get that isn't kinda expensive, and almost certainly nothing that's open source / open hardware / open anything.
  • maartenh 5y ago
    I have done exactly this, and am quite happy with the result. I wrote a python script to listen to state changes of a multi select option in Home Assist, that then calls the snapcast control API to switch between different configurations. This allows me to map different input sources of snapcast (e.g. two separate instances of librespot, two instances of mopidy) to be routed either just my living room, just the kitchen, or both at the same time.
• nunez 5y ago
  Honestly, I just resulted to using a network of Echo Studios/Echo Dots and grouping them. Quality isn't great, but you can't get easier than saying "Alexa, play Christmas Music everywhere."