Mopidy MusicBox VS Groove Basin

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

If you want to see a fun example of this build system in action, have a look at my ffmpeg fork which has the build system ported to zig build:

https://github.com/andrewrk/ffmpeg

Particularly interesting is the use of nasm as a package dependency, which is executed to compile many assembly files into object files, then linked into the ffmpeg static library.

I'm using this package in a work-in-progress reboot of Groove Basin (a music player server) in Zig:

https://github.com/andrewrk/groovebasin/tree/zig-pkg

Point being that if you want to collaborate on the music player project, you don't need to screw around with a million system dependencies, it's just `zig build` and you're off to the races - no matter whether you are using Windows, macOS, or Linux.

The zig build system is under heavy construction during this release cycle of Zig. I recommend to check it out at the end of May when Zig 0.11.0 is released, and a few more issues will be smoothed over. Of course, if you want to get your hands dirty and help work on a bleeding-edge build system & package manager, come on over and give master branch a try.