balena-sound VS owntone-server

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'm working on an ESP32 based NFC record system using OwnTone (https://owntone.github.io/owntone-server/) as the music hosting and playing solution (as it supports AirPlay to all the HomePods in the house). Each HomePod has a smaller ESP32 with a knob for adjusting the volume in a room.

I've been buying lots of music after getting rid of Spotify and wanted the experience of walking in, picking an album, dropping on the player, and then listening to it throughout the house as I make dinner or do chores.

There are a few dockers that seem to be able to do what you want. Some can stream local audio to airplay devices what might work with a bit of scripting for your white noise and others might work as a Chromecast to Airplay bridge https://github.com/philippe44/AirConnect https://github.com/1activegeek/docker-airconnect

Check out OwnTone former daap, https://github.com/owntone/owntone-server it simply browses the dir, can play playlists but will do just folder(s) play too. As a bonus it can airplay/cast.

The thread here [Pi forum] is long (70+ pages so far) and the documentation is here [Github]

A possible solution, especially if you have something like a Raspberry Pi: Owntone

Check it out; https://github.com/owntone/owntone-server

Check out Owntone, it supports MPD. https://owntone.github.io/owntone-server/

I set this up after stumbling on it - https://github.com/owntone/owntone-server and it solves a lot of my issues.