uMQTTBroker VS ESP8266Audio

limited on 8266 https://github.com/martin-ger/uMQTTBroker

You could use MQTT as a form of communication for all the devices, and make all your messages retained, so whenever some device updates the status, all subscribed devices will receive the new message, and because the messages are retained any new device will imediatly receive the retained messages, essencially syncing all current and future devices. Technically you will have an MQTT server, or better know as broker in this context, so a RPi would a good ideia, but an ESP8266 might be sufficient, I've beber tried it though A quick search on Google lead me to this link: "GitHub - martin-ger/uMQTTBroker: MQTT Broker library for ESP8266 Arduino" https://github.com/martin-ger/uMQTTBroker .

Having an issue here using the ESP8266 Audio library (found here).

The Arduino sketch that works for me reads the data out of PROGMEM. When I use that same raw data in ESPhome, it crashes my ESP too. Would there be a way to play from PROGMEM in ESPhome too? Other ways in the library are a function or streaming, but that doesn't fit my use case unfortunately.

If you're getting started, the ESP8266Audio library makes it easy to play audio with the Arduino toolchain. For more advanced use cases, Espressif's own ESP-ADF has a lot of useful features and examples.

Not sure where you got that. According to the ESP8266Audio documentation, the default GPIOs are 2, 15, and 3. You're trying to change 15 to 13.

ESP8266Audio is really fun and easy to use

The ESP32 might suffice for that then, depending on what you consider to be basic applications. It certainly has wifi and bluetooth functionality and you can do audio with an extra chip or an interesting workaround. The ESP32-A1S module even has the necessary chip integrated but you'll likely need to roll a custom PCB for it.

I am simply using the sample code from here. https://github.com/earlephilhower/ESP8266Audio