mpd VS balena-sound

Last week I released v1.0.0 of MphpD - a fully-featured, dependency-free PHP library for the Music Player Daemon. It's my first take on a library so feedback and suggestions is very much welcome and appreciated.

mpd server + mpd clients? https://www.musicpd.org/

Eventually I'd like to continue with the other frontends I have planned, starting with festivald which will be a music daemon, similar to mpd.

It's not written in Java, but if you want to look at some source code and/or protocols to see how it's already been done, look at mpd (https://www.musicpd.org/). IIRC, it actually uses TCP.

Well, it’s a slightly odd use case in that normally the server would just be the server and not also the player, but given the kit you’ve got it makes sense. Probably what you want is MPD plus one of the MPD web clients.

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.

If it is just music, have you considered MPD or similar? An entire DE seems like overkill. There are several good options for doing this and they're not difficult to set up. Even good ol' VLC has an HTTP interface option so you can set it to allow connections from your LAN, then launch in that headless mode, inside tmux or as a service, limited to files from a specific directory tree. It's then controllable from any device on your LAN has a web browser.

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.