balena-sound VS Snapcast

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 tried shairport some time ago, but settled on https://github.com/badaix/snapcast and have a really great and reliable open-source multi-room setup

I’ve had success with Snapcast when looking into this previously https://github.com/badaix/snapcast

https://github.com/badaix/snapcast!

Works perfectly on pis scattered around the house.

Snapcast: The cheapest and most modular option is deploying small form factor linux clients (raspberry pis, or any host all) with an audio interface (3.5mm, RCA, or otherwise), and connect the audio output interface to your choice of speaker. Snapcast is the open-source multi-room brains. It works well in my experience, but it is tricky to get setup properly to start with. Spotify Connect support is possible so you can launch your Spotify listening session from the Spotify app. Snapcast also integrates into Home Assistant for ease of adding/removing clients from the active listening sessions (yes, plural. You can have multiple listening sessions from multiple audio input sources at once).

- snapcast - this server/client software will broadcast synchronized audio from any source to any snapcast client. The server and clients can all run on the same computer. Individual clients are assigned to their own usb soundcard. Source and volume for each client is controlled through the webpage and/or homeassistant.

I have a music library on my home server that I use mopidy to play via the iris plugin integrated into my home assistant UI. It plays over Snapcast which streams over the network to multiple devices in the home with independent volume control. I can fire up the Snapcast client in my phone to get it going there as well, which does work over vpn if I'm away, though I generally just fire up the files from my phones SD card for out-of-home listening. I recently started using whipper on Linux to extract audio from craigslist cds.

https://mopidy.com/

https://mopidy.com/ext/iris/

https://github.com/badaix/snapcast

https://github.com/whipper-team/whipper

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.

Instead of splitting audio from the jack output you can create a Little network with a router and have more rpi streaming music over It using snapcastsnapcast .

If you're into the idea of an open-source client/server architecture, then there's Snapcast. If you have a few Raspberry Pis (one per output source) or any other box that can run Linux and has an audio out interface, then this is cheap and easy with an active Home Assistant integration too.