How to: Build a whole house audio system

I know and I tried and more power to you if it works for you, but it doesn’t for me.
I could make it about ten minutes in before the time drift became noticeable and just got worse from there.
Really wanted it to work. It just didn’t for me.

Snapcast while a pain to manage as a media player in HA as I mentioned above works great in multiple zones at the same time with raspi, old pc or phones as clients.

I am firmly LMS and PiCorePlayer. Absolutely fantastic system and forums. I have 10 players, bridges to AirPlay, Chrome etc with local 60k tracks, Tidal, Spotify, SoundCloud, MixCloud and Amazon. I have two residences up and running.

So the setup I describe basically allows you to have multiple playback zones with multiple music streams. So I could have the basement as one zone, 1st floor speakers as a second zone and 2nd floor as a third zone. I could then play different music streams in each zone. All speakers assigned to a stream playback synchronized. As it’s really a matrix approach, music streams on one axis and playback devices on the other axis you can dynamically configure your zones and then their assigned music stream. I’m curious if you have the same type of flexibility with LMS and PiCorePlayer? The only limit I’ve seen with mopidy is lack of integrations with some music sources. As I use digitized files and spotify it’s not really a big problem. The only thing I wish I had was a good podcast integration.

Hello yes LMS can play to all 15 of my devices with different streams and has full integration with all streaming music sources. It is a fantastic ecosystem

I’m hoping to get a whole home, multi zone amplifier that could be integrated into HA, and was curious if it was possible to get a media server like LMS, to play to media_players in HA.

For example, if I have a 6 zone amplifier, that is shown in HA as 6 different media players, can I get each of those zones to show up as individually in Spotify?

I’m hoping I can avoid having to buy 6 separate hardware clients.

My other alternative would be to get a 7.1 usb sound card and have each channel assigned to a zone. From my research, it can be done, but it’s a bit of a process.

Thanks in advance!

The approach I took was to build the audio system outside of HA and then just provide access to the audio system through the HA web interface using the web card. Hopefully others have the input you desire.

Sadly spotify removed support for libspotify so mopidy no longer works with spotify. Anyone know if LMS will current work with spotify?

Yes LMS works with spotify.

Are they any good "how to"s for LMS you can point to? Are LMS and squeezelite the same thing?

LMS is the server that runs and listens for any clients. Squeezelites are the clients that communicate to the server.

Some more info can be found here:

Start here. LMS needs to be running somewhere and then you need to decide how to connect your clients. For example I use the Airplay plugin to connect to my players. There are a number of options. Install the spotty plugin for Spotify.

https://forums.slimdevices.com/

Brian,

Most of my knowledge came from various web sites. I did get some pointers from HA users especially nickrout.

Squeezelite is a player and LMS is the server.

I have been able to put squeezelite on android and windows. It seamlessly picks up DLNA speakers like my Sonos.

In saying all this in HACS a guy has just released the ‘music assistant’.

It does pretty much the same thing but on a more basic level.

Will be interesting to see how well that goes.

If you need any help with LMS let me know.

Pat

I appreciate the input for LMS. I have the server setup with 3 squeezelite devices. I also gave the spotty app working. The LMS interface leaves something to be desired. I used a web card to make the LMS interface available directly through HA. Works fine from a computer and web browser, however it doesn’t scale very well on a phone when fronted by HA. The LMS interface has the two big box area’s, one for selecting media, the other for showing and controlling the players. Sadly on a phone held in lanscape the media selection box takes up 75% of the embedded web page, leaving 25% for the player interface. This scaling prevents access to player volume. I added the LMS intergation to HA so now I can use a media card to access each player and their associated volume adjustment. The media card also gives an option to select items to play, but it’s really ugly. So is anyone aware of a cleaner interface for integrating LMS with HA? Alternative I guess I’m really asking how have others connected LMS to HA? Here’s the web page integration on my laptop:

Here’s the media cards for each player:

You have to click the dots in the upper right corner of the media cards to actually get the volume

He’s what the LMS interface looks like on my phone using the web card in HA:

No way to access the player volume.

get the material UI addon for LMS, and use ip:port/material

Very nice. Works great on the phone:

yep. I run it ln a smaller card, next to mini-media-player cards, so I can easily access all player volumes:

My wife also uses it so i guess its easy to use :slight_smile:

also:
https://github.com/floris-b/lms_tts_notify exists for tts notifications
and: https://github.com/ynot123/LMS_Controls for voice control

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Thanks for the additional URLs. Text to speech notifications was the next thing I was thinking about looking into. The voice control also looks useful. On your interface you have LMS Sync Controls. Does this enable the player synchronization in LMS? If yes how did you enable these entities and whats is the action executed when you toggle the switches? I have an entity for each player created by the LMS integration. Is the switch just the power button for the entity?

It’s part of the voice control automations (big file) and syncs a specific player to a (selected) master device.

In my screenshot, the drop down selects the master. (here woonkamer)

If I’d turn on the keuken switch, it will sync to woonkamer.

It’s not perfect, as everything unsyncs when you select a different master. But to be honest my sync groups don’t change much so I didn’t spend more time.
For power button in just use the mini media player cards.

I tried to capture the work required to get the LMS based system set up here.

That’s pretty cool…
except that it needs google Home to work :frowning:

Anyone knows of a solution that works without Alex/Google Home or similar?