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Comment by Jaruzel | Hacker News Reader

With this you can cheaply replicate a Sonos style whole home networked music system, by having the recievers be something like some raspberry pi zeros wired up to some amplified speakers.

Ive been wary of stuff like Sonos due to the cost and the proprietary nature of the tech, but this Scream driver seems to be a nice simple alternative.

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I don't have a sonos but isn't one of the selling points the fact that clients are kept in sync? Does this actually do that? Shairport-sync does.

Well, if the receivers are always-on, and listening for the UDP packets from the Windows PC, then surely any lag causing de-syncs would be minimal - in the millisecond range.

For a one-speaker-per-room setup, it would probably be 'good enough'.

Needs investigation I think.

I think you'll be surprised how quickly it drives you nuts (if there's ever the situation where you are hearing another speaker). There's also the rather brilliant https://github.com/badaix/snapcast if you do want sonos-like synchronised playback.

Snapcast would likely work better for this use case - it handles audio endpoint synchronization.

https://github.com/badaix/snapcast

Oooh wasn't aware of Snapcast. Thanks! Bookmarked.

Definitely stay away from Sonos. I bought a pair of cheap Ones a month ago and next thing I knew I had four Ones, four Play:1s, two Beams, and a Connect.

Looking through the source, this implementation is only stereo (so far). Might not be too hard to expand that out to 5.7/7.1.

https://github.com/duncanthrax/scream/blob/35bc85bd830fe40e8...

The Raspberry Pi outputs audio at 14 bits. Its DAC might be too noisy for music applications.

I think most for audio playback would be using an external DAC (i2s or USB).

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