I’m just looking for a bit of advice on my way forward to achieve multiroom audio, and would like to hear about your experiences and setups.
I’m interested in playing music in multiple rooms at once or individual rooms. Should I just buy chromecast audio for each room or go via the mopidy or volumio option.
I don’t want to start with one way and find that I’ve wasted my money and can’t achieve what I want.
I want to be able to play local music and spotify music from the ui and be able to choose which group of speakers to play on.
Which path do you guys recommend I take. Looking at things like cost and ease of setup. Sonos speakers are way out of my price range.
I then have a whole house group configured to cast to all.
I run hadashboard with a iframe panel running the Plex web client (you need to use chrome though to enable casting) works well.
I’m running Windows 10 on a NUC with a 24” touch screen portrait mode in the main lounge that runs my HA on virtualbox and dashboard, Plex server and other bits and bobs.
Touch wood windows hasn’t failed me yet .
We also use the Plex clients on our phones/tablets, also have basic dashboards running for these to control amp power on off in each room etc.
All in I’m pretty happy with it, also have our movie and tv show libraries in Plex to cast to the cc video on TVs via multi zone onkyo receiver
Cool. That’s nice to hear. At the moment I’ve OT 1 cc audio and 2 chromecast videos. All I’ve been able to do with them so far with difficulties is play some audio on them from spotify player with is hit and miss on whether the player remembers the casting devices. I didn’t realise you could cast your plex to them.
Automating Spotify with Chromecast is possible, but only through some hacks. Which mostly has to do with the fact that the spotify connect integration on the chromecasts will not be detected by the spotify component of home assistant.
Actual playing and setup of the chrome casts though is very good. One speaker can be in multiple groups and volume control is smart. You can control the volume when nothing is playing and even use them for TTS without disrupting your Music via Broadcast.
However, do also give Amazon Echo a good look. The New Multiroom integration works quite well and spotify component will directly recognize the groups. However I’m not sure if it’s possible yet to play local files.
I like going the Google home. Chromecast Audio or the Amazon Echo route because it also allows for simple voice control of the audio… I.e. next song, louder etc.
With mopidy or pi this requires a lot of tinkering altough you are more flexible.
If you can afford it, Sonos is excellent. Great quality sound, perfect synchronization, integrates with Home Assistant. Has a client for windows, android, iPhone. Uses wireless connections.
Also I use a logitech media server with PI core audio players. This is a homebuilt solutions which include raspberry PI with a high quality audio top hat card. Is uses squeezeplayers (PI core, moodeaudio, max2play, etc…) sync is perfect when using squeezebased players. Using UPNP / chromecast to connect other types of players works but sync is not perfect. LMS controls in HA is a google voice enabled project to add voice control to the mix.
A lot depends on how easy you want to make it and how much cash you want to spend.
I’m using Spotify and 3 Chromecast Audios with my speakers - when it works it work fine, but …
My old TP-Link router used to freeze now & then, having been overloaded due to a Chromecast communication issue.
This led me to install an Etekcity switchable power plug in front of every Chormecast, now I switch on the Chromecasts only when I want to use them, but man does it take a long time for them to show up as output devices in Spotify. And sometimes the individual speakers show up but the group does not until I restart Spotify.
Not sure, if it’s a Chromecast or a Spotify issue - Pandora seems to work more reliably, but the again, I’m not too thrilled by the way e.g. artist stations work there.
Not necessarily a pi. You need a player at each location (at least for maximum flexibility).
Although Logitech has discontinued them, there is a great second hand market for their players. I have a number of them.
The Boom is a great bedroom player, quite loud when you want it to be. I have one in our master bedroom.
I have a Touch feeding powered speakers in my kitchen/dining area.
I have a SB Classic feeding a cheapish D Class amp feeding outdoor speakers.
I have SB Receiver feeding my main amp in one lounge.
You can run the software player on any computer, but the pi has some specialised distros like picoreplayer. The analogue audio out on the pi is awful. If you are using a pi, you either want to use the digital (ie HDMI) output, or buy an addon board. The Logitech devices all have pretty good audio chips in them, if you can get one on ebay or whatever they are pretty darned fun.
You’ll want to run logitech media server on a computer in your house, I have a server (also my video media) with it on, and it never breaks as sweat despite having to cope with many Gig of music.
I use Logitech mediaserver running on Debian server which runs my NAS (openmediavault) and Home Assistant. For TV / Media rooms, I use an Android tv box running SB player. Android boxes are optical link to the TV soundbar. Sound quality is excellent. Other solutions are PI with Audio tophat board, plugged into an older analog stereo, adding new life to the old stereo (spotify, web radio and of course my personal media collection. I also have several Chromecast and Sonos devices which are also able to play form the LMS server. Finally as mentioned by Nick above, the older Logitech players are also great if you can get your hands on them. LMS can also be interfaced with Home Assistant as an added bonus.
That sounds like it - brought my whole network, not just the WiFi but the LAN as well, to a crawl before it stopped dead.
As I had the Ubiquiti APs already, I went for a great little Ubiquiti Edge Router - great value for money from my POV.
I also use LMS. I use PiCorePlayer on the Pis with nice DACs for my stereos. I also bought a couple of the old Logitech units on ebay - they were $50-75 and are pretty nice. Basically Sonos quality for much cheaper. I also run the ‘squeezelite’ client software on all my computers.
LMS is basically a DIY version of Sonos.
I tried everything else (Volumio, etc.) but LMS is the only thing that does wireless whole house audio easily.
I’m planning to run LMS in docker, because I need Tidal as music streaming source.
But how do I proxy the LMS stream onto another player in HASS? (Do you have config examples, thx)
My plans are Tidal via LMS(docker)->Chromecast(Pioneer AVR…also believe it does support being a squezebox player) - both LMS and AVR is supported by HASS.
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