rpi-audio-receiver VS raspotify

I once installed raspberry pi’s with a Bluetooth audio receiver config. These got installed in a professional football club with each receiver having a name like ‘changing room’ , ‘bar’, ‘manager’. They gave an open connection without PIN codes and lost the active connection as soon as the current device went out of range. We tried a number of ‘real’ Bluetooth devices from Denon and similar but none offered the configurable parts of the raspberrypi’s.

Check this out, it may help you - seems to be describing close to what you're after

When I play a song on my phone/computer that is played on my speaker via bluetooth, I want the lights to be synced to music, where the ceiling and wall lights will each have different effects. I’m thinking of installing LedFx on a Raspberry Pi 4 for music syncing. Do I need https://github.com/nicokaiser/rpi-audio-receiver for this?

This may be linked to be an ongoing conflict between WiFi and Bluetooth. I bought a Hifiberry amp to explore turning a raspberry pi into a receiver, and this GitHub project is amazing for that purpose, but suggests that the RasPi's onboard bluetooth and wifi interfere with each other. I'm intending to try a USB bluetooth dongle to see if it will fix but I'm encouraged by u/AlienMajik 's post above.

Not sure if this works for you https://github.com/nicokaiser/rpi-audio-receiver

I've seen https://github.com/nicokaiser/rpi-audio-receiver but not sure how to get the input from airplay and have it pair and output to the speaker.

I do this currently with spotify, as the rpi runs rpi-audio-receiver with the spotifyd daemon. I like this because from any spotify app I can switch the device over to the rpi and the music comes out of the speakers. I don't need to access any web server running on the pi or have a separate app for playing the music there.

Basically Raspotify but for windows.

If you have a raspberry pi, Raspotify works pretty great as a Connect receiver with a little tinkering.

Raspotify installed on a raspberry pi would be my recommendation. Config allows you to normalise volume controls - have a read here: https://github.com/dtcooper/raspotify/wiki/Configuration

The last.fm site will work independently from airplay, so it will display whatever is playing, even if you are not using airplay to stream to your pi. Because it is just a standard Raspberry Pi OS running, you could also set it up as a MPD client https://linuxhint.com/raspberry-pi-music-station-mpd/ or https://github.com/dtcooper/raspotify. As long as you are submitting music to last.fm the song will display.

I have previously used raspotify on my 3B+, is there any way to achieve something similar on a pico?

For Spotify Connect on a Pi I can recommend Raspotify:

https://github.com/dtcooper/raspotify

https://github.com/dtcooper/raspotify allows you to use Spotify connect on Raspberry Pi's, so you can manually move your music using the Spotify app.