Multi-room audio with Snapcast, Mopidy, and Home Assistant

Mwdouble · October 13, 2020, 8:38pm

Also possible to play it on Sonos and google Home speakers ?

MartiAbernathey · October 14, 2020, 11:15am

Not that I’m aware of. This is basically a way to do multi-room audio through Home Assistant by way of Snapcast. But if you’re trying to do it through Sonos, you might want to check out forked-daapd.

MartiAbernathey · October 14, 2020, 5:14pm

Well, my first experiment didn’t go like I thought it would. Basically you can run multiple servers, but that doesn’t help with streaming audio. I tried taking an old Pi with HA and running the Snapcast client plugin from @raphii on it, but I couldn’t get configured to connect to the Snapcast server plugin. I know it’s probably just a configuration error on my end, but there’s not a lot of documentation on the Snapcast plugin. I think I may just try to just run Snapcast on the client end from the Pi using the Raspian setup. I’m shopping for a surround sound setup in the living room that will interface with my HA PC, and I plan on running Pi Snapcast clients in the office, bathroom, and bedroom.

raphii · October 14, 2020, 7:51pm

Hey guys!
Summer is over, and i’m rebuilding my whole hass setup (including snapcast).
I’ve switched over to a RPi 4 with SSD, which outperforms my Syno DS918+.
I’m still tweaking my zigbee stuff and automations.
In about 1-3 weeks i’ll be at the stage “snapcast refactor”

pcwii · October 14, 2020, 10:07pm

The android client is always good for testing. I also have it running on my homeassistant dashboard.

Burningstone · October 15, 2020, 6:35pm

I have a guide somewhere on how I set it up in the past, but need to search for it. I’ll post it in case I can find it.

alwik · October 26, 2020, 7:50pm

I would be very interested in that guide also @Burningstone! I have been reading and clicking around for hours, installing from various sources: Mopidy, MPD, Snapcast server and client. But all the descriptions of the process seem to refer to client configuration-files that I’m unable to find, and in general I just have lots of things to click on, but no clue how/where/when to start diagnostics, and checking basic functionality…

danbutter · November 11, 2020, 2:22pm

Could you share what you config looks like in the addons please?
I have the edge addon for mopidy installed and the snapserver addon from raphii, but I can’t seem to get them connected. My modipy page shows disconnected.

Thanks

danbutter · November 11, 2020, 2:23pm

I would also be very interested to see the guide if you can locate it!

MartiAbernathey · November 12, 2020, 5:00am

Do you have both the snapserver and the snapclient installed?

aerodolphin · November 13, 2020, 12:24am

It’s possible to send TTS messages to the clients? To all or selected clients?

Something like this:

github.com

happyleavesaoc/my-home-automation/blob/fa78c8a51daa03dd447ebb55fae4540192cab72e/homeassistant/packages/multiroom_audio.yaml

#########################################################################
# Multi-Room Audio
#
#  Multi-room audio consists of a network of speakers throughout the
#  house. Each speaker can be assigned to a channel, and all speakers
#  on the same channel play the same thing, with time synchronization.
#
#  There are three different audio sources:
#  1) Spotify: librespot acts as a "Spotify Connect"-enabled device.
#              This means that it can be selected via the mobile app,
#              desktop client, etc (just like Alexa, for example). The
#              librespot instance is named "Multi-room audio". Playing
#              to the device routes audio to the server.
#  2) Local Music: Music Player Daemon aka "mpd" is a music server that
#                  manages local audio files.
#  3) TTS: Text-to-speech messages generated by Home Assistant.
#
#  The audio distribution from the server to the speakers is via the
#  open-source software "snapcast". It has a server component that reads
#  from a named pipe per audio source, and client components that run

This file has been truncated. show original

danbutter · November 15, 2020, 9:53pm

I do, but I can’t figure out how to do the config in the addons. All the guides I have found tell you to go to a config file and edit and save, but I don’t know how to translate that into something that the addons can use.
Any chance you could post your configuration of the mopidy, snapcast server and client addons so I can see how to enter the info?

Thanks,
Dan

fietstasss · December 30, 2020, 7:11pm

I’d like to create an Multi-Room audio system in which I can have 1 or multiple sources to play on one or many audio devices.
These devices will mainly be an Onkyo soundsystem with (among others) an Android TV (Nvidia Shield) connected to it (optionally can add an Pi Zero), an auxillary speaker plugged into a Windows PC, and if possible multiple google home mini’s and hub’s.

Source will be mainly from Spotify, but would be interesting if for example even every sound coming from the Shield could be used as ‘source’.

What is currently the best way to start with this? Is it possible to run all server-related stuff in an VMware machine? Or even better, inside Home Assistant?

Thanks in advance.

ThaNerd · January 17, 2021, 2:11pm

I can’t get snapcast to work, it alwas shows as disconnected…

Burningstone · January 17, 2021, 2:14pm

Is the snapserver running and working correctly? Does it work from your phone?

ThaNerd · January 17, 2021, 2:16pm

I’m running the server side and client side on my VM where my Hassio is (running from within Hassio). I’ve forwarded the ports 1780, 1704 and 1705 in my router but still nothing…

The client shows this in log:

2021-01-17 09-15-26 [Error] (worker) Exception in Controller::worker(): resolve: Host not found (authoritative)
2021-01-17 09-15-26 [Error] (stop) Error in socket shutdown: Bad file descriptor

this is the config of the server:

stream:
  streams:
    - >-
      pipe:///share/snapfifo/librespot?name=SpotifyConnect&sampleformat=44100:16:2
    - 'pipe:///share/snapfifo/mopidy?name=Mopidy&sampleformat=44100:16:2'
  buffer: '1000'
  codec: flac
  send_to_muted: 'false'
  sampleformat: '48000:16:2'
http:
  enabled: 'true'
  doc_root: ' '
tcp:
  enabled: 'true'
logging:
  enabled: 'true'
server:
  threads: '-1'
  datadir: /share/snapcast/

Burningstone · January 17, 2021, 2:27pm

Why do you open ports in your router???

Again, can you connect to the snapserver from your phone (you can use the snapcast app to test)?

ThaNerd · January 17, 2021, 2:32pm

I thought the port forwarding will help.
Tried via the app from my phone and it doesn’t connect.

Shows: error unknown host

Burningstone · January 17, 2021, 2:41pm

I’m dying, you know that you poke a hole in your system every time you forward a port from your router?

Anyway, what did you enter in the field for the host? Should be the IP of your machine running Snapserver.

ThaNerd · January 17, 2021, 2:44pm

When I use my duckdns link it doesn’t work but when I placed my actual hassio local IP it connected via phone app.