Show HN: Multi-room audio with Snapcast and Raspberry Pi

I use Snapcast and mopidy on a home server with the iris front end. It integrates with home assistant so you can have automations play sounds in all or some rooms.

With covid I've been able to pipe my meetings to snapcast from the web browser (listen only) which is great for restroom breaks and snacks in long unengaging meetings.

I rigged up a AC sniffer circuit and wifi microcontroller to my dumb doorbell which snapcasts a recording of a doorbell chime throughout the house when it's pressed so I can hear it when music is playing.

Snapcast can also stream to a phone, so I can Bluetooth into the hot tub speakers and have it on the whole house audio too.

Open source home automation with home assistant and this tech is really fun if you want to get into it as a hobby. Certainly requires work, but that's fun for me.

I also have it all integrated into a home-brew weather station and an indoor air quality sensor system with co2 and pm levels so I can get alerts to open windows or turn on fans if co2 gets too high. I also get raindrop noises when it starts raining so I go close the windows. Fun times.

Of course there's a security system involved too which arms at night and when the family's WiFi all disconnects. It disarms automatically based on WiFi auth and an openwrt script, so it's totally autonomous. Works very well.

Working on a tensorflow based automation now to have the front door camera detect packages and send email alerts. Does not work at all, yet.

All local, all self-hosted, with a bridged MQTT server on a VPS for communicating with my location tracker and my mom's house (I get alerts if she's on vacation and the furnace dies or basement floods or there's a break in or whatever). I vpn in to my router to control things when out. But if internet dies at home, everything local still works great.

Mopidy also connects to Spotify, of course.

https://mopidy.com/ext/iris/

https://www.home-assistant.io/

After kicking around a bunch of these solutions and discovering that none of them work quite right or you still have to spend quite a bit on the hardware, I eventually bent the knee to Sonos recently. The interface is pretty garbage, but it just works and the sound quality is good.

Part of it was that I just don’t think I could face the wrath of my family when it didn’t work. I guess you get to a point in life when you have kids, and hours for tinkering are reduced so you need to pick your battles.

I like the Snapcast model though, it follows the Linux philosophy. From memory the audio stream is basically just wrapped along with a time stamp. Then you transfer those blocks to another device that plays them at the right time (where they’re unwrapped back into an audio stream).

Volumio’s pi OS is a pretty easy way to do this. There’s a Snapcast plugin on github along with instructions. Pair the pi with a hifiberry amp and some speakers and you’ve got your own custom networked audio client.

We’ve got sync’d audio running in 4 different rooms at home and control via home assistant. Not as easy as Sonos I’m sure but I like that I can use whatever speakers I want.

I've recently had some time to go through a spate of "home improvement" (needless tinkering) tech projects.

Replacing alexa and ok google devices with open source ones was on the list. This looks great for the music - though I was mainly stuck for good voice control.

The holy grail for cheap-ass networked audio is a surround-sound set constructed from random (or a set of) Bluetooth speakers and some sort of wireless receiver. I can't tell you how many people came into my old workplace expected that to be possible, and being disappointed that the only options were somewhat expensive demi-audiophile WiFi-based (read: hooked into an app that required an internet connection and sometimes iOS) solutions from Sonos/Bose/B&W/Klipsch that locked you into their platform. IIUC latency and bandwidth are an issue?

This is a cool step in the right direction though.

Snapcast seems to also have integrations with Airplay and Home Assistant. This post is also quite nice, I've saved it to use as reference for whenever I get around to setting up Snapcast.

Nice article you can hook up studio monitors like genelec 8010 for a very good sounding setup. Monitors will Likely last a lifetime so better for the environment.

This looks like an interesting project. I found the naming creative: (S)y(n)chronous (a)udio (p)layer.