audioserve-web VS mpd

"bag of tricks to smooth out perceived latency and fault tolerance."

Agree - audioserve is now handling this with quite simple trick - just cache ahead couple of tracks/files from current folder (aka audiobook), so responsibility is move to client.

Surprisingly this simple trick did work for me for years (as I'm intensive user of audioserve). It kind of depends on file/chapter duration - but for most common cases - which are beetween 5 mins to say 90 mins it did work fine.

Historically only Android client was using this caching, but with new web client https://github.com/izderadicka/audioserve-web and broad Service Worker support in browsers it is also available in browser.

Last week I released v1.0.0 of MphpD - a fully-featured, dependency-free PHP library for the Music Player Daemon. It's my first take on a library so feedback and suggestions is very much welcome and appreciated.

mpd server + mpd clients? https://www.musicpd.org/

Eventually I'd like to continue with the other frontends I have planned, starting with festivald which will be a music daemon, similar to mpd.

It's not written in Java, but if you want to look at some source code and/or protocols to see how it's already been done, look at mpd (https://www.musicpd.org/). IIRC, it actually uses TCP.

Well, it’s a slightly odd use case in that normally the server would just be the server and not also the player, but given the kit you’ve got it makes sense. Probably what you want is MPD plus one of the MPD web clients.

You want SnapCast. You'd run snapserver on your Linux box and snapclient on your Pi's. Snapserver has support for Airplay (via shairport-sync) and Spotify (via librespot). I recommend using MPD for your music library, as I don't think PlexAmp can output audio in a way that's useful for snapserver.

If it is just music, have you considered MPD or similar? An entire DE seems like overkill. There are several good options for doing this and they're not difficult to set up. Even good ol' VLC has an HTTP interface option so you can set it to allow connections from your LAN, then launch in that headless mode, inside tmux or as a service, limited to files from a specific directory tree. It's then controllable from any device on your LAN has a web browser.