Revamping Vinyl: Automating Turntable to Sonos with Raspberry Pi and a Door sensor

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1

Recently got a Sonos soundbar with no support for bluetooth or audio input other than HDMI. Wanted to be able to play music from my turntable to the soundbar, so I had to figure out an alternative way to do this.

Stumbled upon Add Aux to Sonos Using Raspberry Pi - Instructables and Sonos ↔ Vinyl // stevegattuso. I had a spare Raspberry Pi and Behringer USB sound card so I installed Pi OS Lite, darkice and icecast2. This gave me a working audio stream which was exposed locally on the RPi.

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Then I just needed to send this audio stream to Sonos. Thought that would be challenging, but it wasn’t at all. Figured out it’s possible to use the “Media player: Play media” action in HomeAssistant to play the turntable audio stream with the Sonos speaker as a target. Wanted to join in another speaker and set the default volume, so I made a script for that. See below:

script 
alias: Play turntable on Sonos
sequence:
  - data:
      volume_level: 0.2
    target:
      entity_id:
        - media_player.living_room
        - media_player.dining_room
    action: media_player.volume_set
  - data:
      group_members:
        - media_player.dining_room
    action: media_player.join
    target:
      entity_id:
        - media_player.living_room
  - data:
      media_content_id: http://192.168.1.101:8000/turntable.mp3.m3u
      media_content_type: music
    target:
      entity_id: media_player.living_room
    action: media_player.play_media
icon: mdi:album

So by starting the script above, it would use the audio stream as a source for the Sonos group. Perfect! But if I were to play music from Spotify or another source on the speakers, it would “break” the audio stream source. And I don’t want to manually start the script each time I play something on the turntable.

The tonearm moves automatically to the starting position when physically pressing “play” on the turntable. So this movement indicates it’s starting. But how to catch this as a sensor value? Maybe a door/window sensor? As a quick proof of concept I attached a door/window sensor from Aqara with some rubber bands and made an automation with this as a trigger. When the sensor value is “open”, it runs the script above.

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I think I’ll just keep this proof of concept as-is for now :slight_smile:

2

Nice. Now all you need to figure out is how to automatically move the arm when you say “Drop my needle”…

3

Really good idea! Just one tip (in case you haven’t already thought about it), make sure to weigh the stylus again after attaching the sensor since it should mess up with the balance.

4

Or remove the rubber band part and attach a tiny neodymium magnet instead. It’s essentially the same thing, but much lighter.

5

I know it will make it unbalanced, but it doesn’t support weight adjustment. Also thought about adding a smaller magnet to make it weight less.

6

Thanks for sharing.
I just setup my own DarkIce/IceCast on a DietPi.
The url for streaming is working in a webbrowser, but I cannot add it to HA.
Have you added tunein to the Sonos app? I am trying it set it up without, i wonder if it is possible.

I used this script:

alias: Play turntable on Sonos Roam
sequence:
  - target:
      entity_id: media_player.sonos_roam
    data:
      volume_level: 0.44
    action: media_player.volume_set
  - target:
      entity_id: media_player.sonos_roam
    data:
      group_members: media_player.sonos_roam
    action: media_player.join
  - target:
      entity_id: media_player.sonos_roam
    data:
      media:
        media_content_id: http://192.168.200.114:8000/DietPi
        media_content_type: music
        metadata: {}
    action: media_player.play_media
mode: single
icon: mdi:album

If i use```
http://192.168.200.114:8000/DietPi.mp3
http://192.168.200.114:8000/DietPi.mp3.m3u

i get errors.
```[140135803137024] Error during service call to script.play_turntable_on_sonos_roam: Error calling SonosMediaPlayerEntity._play_media on media_player.sonos_roam: UPnP Error 714 received: Illegal MIME-Type from 192.168.200.XXX``
7

Hello !

:musical_note: Just released turntable-mqtt-bridge — a lightweight bridge that automatically detects when your vinyl record player is spinning and switches your Sonos speaker to the turntable stream.

Built on a Raspberry Pi Zero with Darkice + Icecast for the audio stream, a Python script for RMS-based audio detection, MQTT for signaling, and a Home Assistant automation to handle the Sonos switching.

No physical sensor needed — it listens to the actual audio stream and reacts in seconds.

:point_right: GitHub - 38decibel/turntable-mqtt-bridge: Détection automatique de la lecture d'une platine vinyle USB et basculement automatique d'un speaker Sonos via MQTT et Home Assistant. · GitHub

Feedback welcome!