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Comment by q87b | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand what this is and what it does? Can someone provide a ELI5?

It turns your good old hifi system into smart speakers:

When listening to music on your phone, you can choose to listen via Ottercast. Then the music will come out of the hifi system connected to the ottercast.

It does this via Wifi and the protocols Airplay, Pulseaudio, Spotify Connect and Snapcast.

How would I do the reverse? That is, turn smart speakers into regular speakers. I have a Sonos Move but it can't play audio from my desktop PC with no bluetooth. I could buy a bluetooth dongle, but honestly I find wired connections easier to manage than pairing bluetooth devices, especially when you need to switch paired devices. I was hoping this OtterCast would have both bluetooth and line-in so I could do this (connect the bluetooth to the Sonos and the line-in to a desktop or other device).

Presuming you're using linux you can use one of the ottercast devices as a pulseaudio network sinc. It should just show up in your list of audio devices, although I admit I've never actually used a network pulseaudio sinc. If you wanted fancier multi-room audio you could install snapcast on your computer.

Oh nice, thank you!

It's a small audio streamer that allows you to use some common audio streaming protocols (Airplay for iOS devices, Spotify Connect for Spotify users etc) with audio line out for speakers & headphones. It looks like an open source version of something like a Wiim Mini which should give you something to search against to see what they do.

Ah, that makes sense. Thank you!

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