Mopidy MusicBox VS gonic

Is there a reason you need to use carplay instead of something like pi musicbox? What exactly is the USB dongle for?

I saw something here on reddit where people were taking the little $5 raspberry pi zero's and basically building their own chromecast audios with them. I am not sure this is the same thing I saw but I found this on google. https://www.pimusicbox.com/

I have a few rooms in my house which I have audio, but they are far enough apart that I won't be trying to stream to all at once. I am also a mostly Apple user, so I use Raspberry Pi's with Hifiberry AMP2 and shairport-sync (AirPlay target). I can select any of the Pi's as the speaker output on any Apple device. There's also a pre-made Raspberry Pi distribution called pi music box which also offers other protocols than AirPlay.

Get yourself a Raspberry Pi and battery pack if you're mobile, and check this guide out. That'll run Spotify 24x7.

Look what I've found: https://www.pimusicbox.com/ This should perfectly suit your needs..

Currently, my plan is to use https://www.pimusicbox.com/ with some sort of DAC, an undetermined raspberry pi model, and a micro SD card for storage (total flac library is just under 500 gigs). I'm not incredibly well versed in pi projects (have made a few successful retropie builds for friends) and am an amateur when it comes to coding and linux. Regardless, this project will be a hobby , so learning, failing, and growing are all part of the plan.

Pi MusicBox

https://www.pimusicbox.com/ I found this which has chromecast support and airplay, but it doesn't support rpi4 it seems

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)!

In the past I've used Airsonic, Gonic, Plex, and Jellyfin. Just for a bit o' variety

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

Gonic