Does anyone know of a good (from a privacy and usability perspective) alternative to Sonos?
I plan to buy 5-6 of them sometime later this year, and for what that costs, they have no excuse to data-harvest me.
I plan to buy 5-6 of them sometime later this year, and for what that costs, they have no excuse to data-harvest me.
"Usability" means very different things to different people (after all, the reason Sonos asks for location access is to improve usability), but maybe look at https://volumio.org/, http://www.runeaudio.com/, http://moodeaudio.org/.
Or just install MPD and Pianobar for that old school experience.
I have run a few Airport Expresses for the past 10 years and love them. Older models are cheap (<$30) and still work great.
[1] https://support.hifiberry.com/hc/en-us/articles/205699981-Ho...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Micca-PB42X-Powered-Bookshelf-Speaker...
Take it a step further (if you prefer portability of sound quality) and get an SBC with a bluetooth adapter, and several bluetooth modules which you can rig up to each speaker.
You can probably go by using a couple raspberry pis (or any ARM board with a jack output), a preconfigured SD card image, and some external speakers. I don't know the price of Sonos speakers, but I don't think it would be much higher. I guess someone could even create a business out of this, especially if tailoring the PCBs to the task.