gonic VS squeezelite-esp32

Gonic seems to be the most active fork of Subsonic that supports browsing via folders, but there's no Windows support. I'm considering running it via Docker on my Windows server but haven't had a chance to look into the pros/cons of that. Curious if anyone here can shed some light on this for me

I've always thought of that one to be more useful when e.g. using gonic, which comes with out a web interface (and seems pretty awesome overall, although I have never tried it myself since I'm quite happy with Navidrome).

Just wanted to give quick plug for my music player app Supersonic! It's a client for Subsonic API-compatible servers, so it handles the UI and playback while the server (Gonic or LMS would be good lightweight choices for localhost-only setup) handles the library management/metadata indexing. It's a quite young project but I have lots of plans for continued improvement and new features (and would gladly accept contributions)!

i would say it's a bit experimental, but you could try gonic (subsonic jukebox mode) + snapcast

Gonic

Gonic to stream my music

Agreed on the first two, for browse by folder there is a new one that seems pretty awesome and much, much more lightweight/efficient than Airsonic: gonic

That depends on your requirements, which I can't find in your post. For me it's gonic with dsub.

and apparently an esp32! https://github.com/sle118/squeezelite-esp32

I got one of the AI thinker esp32-A1S audio kits (https://docs.ai-thinker.com/en/esp32-audio-kit) which I was hoping to run as a DAC for a logitech media server using squeezelite-esp32. Apparently these boards are quite finicky and a bit challenging to flash, but having tried all the obvious fixes and various ideas that duckduckgo had to offer, I'm still stuck in a boot loop. I've got dedicated power going into USB1 and connected to a USB-C port on my MacBook via USB2. I've tried with the dip switches all up, all down, and in the default 3 up / 2 down configuration, each time erasing the flash memory completely before trying to load the squeezelite-esp32 binary. Using ESPHome-Flasher, I get the following dialogue:

In theory yes, but it is more of a 'whole summer project' than 'one evening project'. There are small ESP32 Wi-Fi modules that could be connected to small I2S headphones amplifier. Both should fit inside bigger cups like DT770 has if you remove acoustic padding. You also would have to build custom dock for mixing audio inputs, converting them to digital and pushing data through Wi-FI, possibly also ESP32 based with external ADCs. The hardest part will be writing custom code to glue it all together. There are some ESP32 Wi-Fi streaming libs like: https://github.com/sle118/squeezelite-esp32 This would be a good starting point, but the amount of customisation to achieve what you described will be non-trivial. Battery life of headphones would not be stellar either, ESP modules are more suited to be used in smart home appliances powered from the grid. I'd guess about 3 hours with 750mAh battery while streaming over Wi-Fi.

Squeezelite has also been ported to the ESP32, so one could probably create (or recreate) the old Logitech/Slim Devices hardware clients, VFD displays and all.