ESP8266Audio VS loudgain

Having an issue here using the ESP8266 Audio library (found here).

The Arduino sketch that works for me reads the data out of PROGMEM. When I use that same raw data in ESPhome, it crashes my ESP too. Would there be a way to play from PROGMEM in ESPhome too? Other ways in the library are a function or streaming, but that doesn't fit my use case unfortunately.

If you're getting started, the ESP8266Audio library makes it easy to play audio with the Arduino toolchain. For more advanced use cases, Espressif's own ESP-ADF has a lot of useful features and examples.

Not sure where you got that. According to the ESP8266Audio documentation, the default GPIOs are 2, 15, and 3. You're trying to change 15 to 13.

ESP8266Audio is really fun and easy to use

The ESP32 might suffice for that then, depending on what you consider to be basic applications. It certainly has wifi and bluetooth functionality and you can do audio with an extra chip or an interesting workaround. The ESP32-A1S module even has the necessary chip integrated but you'll likely need to roll a custom PCB for it.

I am simply using the sample code from here. https://github.com/earlephilhower/ESP8266Audio

I also found this tool: https://github.com/Moonbase59/loudgain

And that led me to this GitHub project which acts like mp3gain but uses the newer loudness algorithm for LUFS: https://github.com/Moonbase59/loudgain

I personally use a real-time loudness normalization algorithm all the time (ffmpeg's loudnorm filter) for any sort of streaming video (e.g. YouTube), and for static audio (e.g. music files) I use loudgain.