I am looking to add some wall/ceiling mount speakers to a few rooms. I am looking to see if there are any suggestions for some device/devices that might fit what i am trying to do.
would like something that i can have play streaming music (spotify or something, don’t really care)
would also like the option to pair via bluetooth (not a hard requirement because i anticipate putting a mixer/amp in so i may just add a bluetooth receiver to that)
would like something that integrates well for home assistant so i can have it still do tts notifications or play music to those rooms ect.
My thoughts so far are
mixer/amp to take multiple inputs if necessary and power the speakers
simple bluetooth audio dongle
maybe a raspberry pi with mpd or something similar
I’m doing this with Raspberry’s running Volumio in some rooms. Except living room, where a Denon receiver does its thing. All of it is well integrated in HA.
But, I’m not using TTS on my media players. I have TTS announcer separated stand alone, i like it more that way.
Logitech Media Server (LMS) and PiCore Player (PCP) running on RaspberryPis (RPi).
In my case, LMS is in a jail on TrueNAS Core and the RPi acts as the local player with a DAC HAT as the output to active speakers.
Alternatively, both LMS and PCP can run on one RPi acting both as the server and player (with DAC HAT, of course) while less powerful RPis can act as players only. With stereo Class D Amps for each RPi, you have a cheap, reliable, excellent system that has a good HA integration. I’m not dure about Bluetooth but I think later model RPis have it.
I have played with LMS in the past and picore player too. I haven’t checked to see what streaming support it has in quite some time. Very cool to hear it’s still used
Still used? It is now at 8.3 beta; I’m running 8.2. It is under constant development, as is PiCore Player.
LMS streams nearly everything and PCP is brilliant. I use open source Squeezer on an Android phone which controls LMS, and, as you are probably aware, LMS treats the PCPs as players transparently.
Forgot to mention, my choice for Volumio was quiet easy. It works fine with Qobuz and Spotify (and Tidal, but I don’t use that). Both were mandatory for me. And it does great job on multiroom audio. But that is only a nice plus, i did not require…
multi-room audio is a big bonus i could really enjoy. i work from home so periodically having music playing through the house when im moving about would be sweet!
I haven’t tried anything lower than a 3B so can’t say what PCP will run on. I suspect lower spec will be fine, check it k the forums. For LMS and PCP, you will need something like a 3.
LMS allows individual and//or group syncing of players. If you have four rooms, you’ll only need four RPis. If you have stored music, LMS can do local USB and network shares. There are plugins for Spotify, Deezer, and the rest.
I have multiple Yamaha receivers, the newest being a RX-V6A. Multi-zone, can handle streaming from any of the sources you mention, good integration with HA, and I stream Plex to them using Chromecasts.
I went this route since I prefer better speakers than Sonos/Alexa/Google provide. Depending on the location, I either have speakers in the ceiling, or bookshelf speakers, or outdoor speakers. All are Klipsch, Reference series where possible. Presently, I drive multiple speaker pairs from one zone by using the OSB in-wall volume knobs. These allow for impedance matching, and also allow you to have music playing in only some rooms. Long term, I will be adding more receivers to get a 1:1 match of channels/zones to speaker pairs, but it wasn’t in the budget when the install was done. I’ll get there.
If you decide to go Yamaha, look in the Projects section. I wrote some stuff to allow for full-range adjustment of the Yamaha receivers since the built-in media_player in HA is incapable of adjusting them above 0dB.
First I was also thinking about using Raspberries with HiFiBerry or similar AMPs and LMS.
A while ago I’ve seen the Amps from Arylic, which looked very promissing.
They offer so called DIY boards which are basically amplifier boards without a case and they can therefor be used for DIY projects.
They are using Linkplay and there is a Home Assistant integration for it.
I recently ordered 5 Arylic Up2Stream v4 Amplifier borads and they are working quite good. The setup is pretty easy: You can download the 4Stream app which allows you to set the W-Lan accesspoint of the devices over bluetooth. With a Lan connection this step is probably not needed but I did not test it.
All the borads in the network can then be grouped and ungrouped over the app and you can select the music for each of the boards or groups.
I am stil playing around with the Home Assistant integration but I have no experience with media players in HA so I am still struggeling a bit with that part.
Playing a TTS notification was quite easy. I also managed to play a stream from an internet radio but most of the times I need to select the source multiple times until it finaly manages to play. The other times it shows the station name and the currently played song for a few seconds, without playing any music, and then the player stops again. But that might be a problme with the stream or my configuration.
I have the 2.1 version. In my office, it powers 2 Klipsch bookshelfs and a sub. I would not call it audiophile quality, but for the 80 square foot office it fills the room nicely.
I source it from a media server, so I havent tried it with WiiM.
I have a Pi Zero W with a 3W HAT amp running to my kitchen speakers. Picoreplayer runs in RAM so no effect on the storage. I also switch PCP off/on in a shell command to play a “bing/bong” from the front door bell sensor.
Hi @embee I recently added Announce functionality to the squeezebox integration, so you don’t need to mess around with scripts anymore - just use a play_media action.
Reporting back. It successfully stopped the music currently playing and played the required sound. However, the music did not resume and showed the player as stopped with no original track target. I tried it on both the local PC player (Kodi) and the remote picoreplayer.
So, that’s just playing it then without announce. This will only work when playing via the squeezebox integration (or Sonos or B&O). How are you playing to Kodi - are you playing via an lms plugin perhaps? If you try and play via an action, do you see the announce toggle as an option?
