Hacker News Reader

Comment by sk5t | Hacker News Reader

Likewise, I shifted Sonos to the "dead to me" category when they removed from their desktop software almost all abilities to configure the rooms/speakers. Gotta use the iOS/Android app now. Oh, and the app really wants you to make a Sonos account and sign in, for no customer-serving reason at all.

From here on it'll be a Pi connected to an amplifier and speakers that won't try to subvert my will simply to listen to music.

View on HN

What setup are you considering using with the pi and speakers? I'm also interested in doing this, but haven't found a good OSS solution (yet).

For the moment it's a Pi 4 + Hifiberry Digi+ Pro with Volumio software. Volumio provides a pretty decent web UI, automatic scanning of connected USB storage, Airplay (v1), and a Spotify Connect plugin. There are also other plugins but I haven't looked into them too closely.

I also liked Roon Bridge on the Pi (and felt the audio output was slightly improved, although made no effort to counter the placebo effect) but couldn't quite justify the cost.

If you have a Linux box like a Pi, you can expose that machine's audio device over the network with PulseAudio, and if you have that enabled, it'll autoconfigure and work like any other PulseAudio device.

I used to share my DAC between my laptop and my desktop this way. Whenever I plugged my headphones in, it'd default to them on the local device, and the remote would default to the network device. I could walk away from my desktop while playing something, and it'd continue playing on whichever I had my headphones plugged into.

I’m using a Raspberry Pi with shairport-sync, a SPDIF HAT and a Maestro-50 amplifier (that I got for cheap) and am really happy with it. I even route TV audio through it and have a IR sensor for remote control.

i bought a play:1 years ago for the bathroom, mostly just to play radio or stream to it while getting ready in the morning. the account thing upset me too. i haven't updated the firmware or the sonos app just so i wouldn't have to create a stupid account.

i like the ikea symfonisk speakers but won't buy them for the same reason.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com