balena-sound VS mpd

Since posting this, I also discovered Balena-sound:

https://github.com/balena-io-experimental/balena-sound

I haven't yet been able to try it yet, but may be an alternative to snapcast.

Have a look at the Balena Sound project on Github here and other possible options would be Volumino or RuneAudio - they are not up to professional multi-room sound systems but may give you some of the functionality you want.

So I wrote a headless plexamp plugin for the Balena Sound project. Its currently in the pull request phase right now but it would be cool to have people test.

It actually is. You can use balena sound as a base image and then install plexamp on top: https://github.com/balenalabs/balena-sound

Try this, it is made for raspberry pi but you might be able to run it on your laptop. https://sound.balenalabs.io/

Or you can tey something like this https://sound.balenalabs.io

First 10 devices on balena are free, its used by many thousands of hobbyists.

For example balenaSound is very popular, for multi-room audio with rapsberry pi's https://sound.balenalabs.io/

There is also balenaHub, which hosts many community projects and introduces the concept of "open fleets", bring your device and join the fleet, instead of managing it yourself https://hub.balena.io/fleets

Disclosure: I am an engineer at balena.

I use mpd with various clients, mostly also from terminal. mpd support would be great - and actually the only reason for me to try it out.

https://www.musicpd.org/

No need to use the server, Navidrome allows any client to connect remotely (WAN included) and play music that is hosted on the server. It also can be set up to transcode on the fly uncompressed music when it is accessed from a metered connection to minimize bandwidth usage. I barely scratched its surface, but it looks promising. The only requirement is that it needs the correct metadata to identify songs and download the correct lyrics, album images etc. There's a software called Musicbrainz Picard however that can be used to identify songs with incomplete or missing id3 tags data and it works using audio fingerprinting against a remote database so it should be accurate.

https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

Back to your post, if you need to play music from the server, take a look at the mpd daemon and its remote interfaces. It does the opposite as it plays from the server while the clients would be used as remote controls so that you can for example install mpd on a small single board computer (or more scattered around the house), configure them to access local or remote mount point, then grab your phone and tell the server to play the desired song.

https://www.musicpd.org/

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.