I recently discovered Music Assistant which is an awesome player/media server to stream to many different streaming client. e.g. Snapcast/Snapclient or Slimproto/Squeezelite and others.
I tinkered around with snapcast clients first. I use three Raspberry Pi Zero’s, two with the hifiberry dac and one connected to my hifi system via hmdi.
So far, they work quite well but I realized many people use squeezelite as streaming client and I was wondering if there’s any benefit or additional feature squeezelite has over snapcast.
Based on the manual page of Music Assistant, Slimproto has some more features but I don’t know if they make a difference. e.g. Sync Correction.
Does anyone have experience with both protocols and clients?
My experience is the most popular protocols are the least buggy, which makes some sense given the support model. Outliers, like FKB are not bug free. I started with snapcast but finally landed on Airplay2 with a Wiim device even though I’m not an Apple household.
Interesting, thanks. I am a little bit hesitant with proprietary protocols like Airplay since they could stop working anytime.
like mentioned here:
The functionality offered by Shairport Sync is the result of study and analysis of the AirPlay and AirPlay 2 protocols by many people over the years. These protocols have not been officially published, and there is no assurance that Shairport Sync will continue to work in future.
I think with hardware receivers like Wiim, this is maybe not a problem but how about the player/server part. e.g. in Music Assistant?
Can you be more specific with your question? I’m not sure what you mean by “how about”?
True, but it’s a problem shared by any Python library that isn’t for a published API. Home Assistant is full of them I’m afraid. The advantage is that more people will complain if a problem pops up with this protocol and likely get more and faster support.
i see your point.
the “how about” questions was related to the fact that it’s not open source but rather reversed engineered. I understand that what counts for the clients also counts for the server. got that.
I am really looking for open source multiroom protocols and the two I know are snapcast and slimproto.
If there are more, I am happy to get pointed to.
Regarding non open API, I’ve been running Alexa Multiroom with Home Assistant Integration and it has been a pita over the years. There’s definitely Amazon to blame but that’s the reason why I’am looking for something stable which doesn’t stop working if the company behind believes changing the code is a great idea.
Yep, and as I mentioned in my post, my only experience was the Snapcast protocol which was “OK to good”. My experience with FKB was “horrible”, even after opening issues on GitHub. After switching to the Wiim I’ve been much happier.
I’m also running the Alexa Media Player integration and haven’t had too many issues with it. I realize it’s on “life support” but so far, it’s been working far more than it hasn’t.
I moved over from snapcast to sqeezelite for testing purposes. First I tried
Then I installed piCorePlayer on my raspberry pi’s. This much easier to handle and works quite well.
So far I can tell, that the connection itself when playing music seems to be a little more stable and there are more options for speakers like having an equalizer for each speaker.
However I ran into new issues. Mainly, that the speakers started disappearing in Music Assistant every now and then. But I can’t really tell if that’s a protocol, network or Music Assistant issue.
I checked out Wiim Devices and got some questions.
Do you use the Wiim device as the main unit controlling everything or as a client controlled by some other Player like e.g. LMS or Music Assistant?
If it’s the main unit, what is the controller/player you use with Wiim? Is it the Wiim App?
Is Wiim capable of connecting to other clients like my Rasperry pis with piCorePlayer and handle synced multiroom?
I don’t have any experience with this scenario, but if I understand your question correctly, they perform the same service - hardware that takes in some music stream and converts it to a standard audio output. Not sure it would make sense to feed Wiim into these devices although I suppose it could be done. Generally, the source stream could be grabbed directly by the piCore player.
So far, it’s been the most reliable client I’ve used with Music Assistant. I still have some issues with Music Assistant’s normalization process, but I keep it on because the consistent source audio levels outweigh the downsides. I don’t think the Wiim device has anything to do with this process, however.
yes, I was thinking of replacing Music Assistant with a device like Wiim Pro / Pro Plus connected to my hifi and have clients/players connected to my other speakers via aux in. For the latter I would love to use a cost efficient way like using Raspberry Pi’s with a DAC hat.
I’ve been playing around with some multiroom systems since quite a long time.
First I bought into the Onkyo/Pioneer system which promised to have great usability and flexibility by using the so called Flareconnect open protocol. Unfortunately the usability has never been good neither did any other vendor jumped on the Flareconnect train and therefore there were only two different wireless speakers available which weren’t very good. Furthermore there were a lot of disconnects and other weird issues.
Then I went for Amazon Echo’s in every Room. However the usability of the Alexa App wasn’t good from my point of view and it was impossible to group speakers on demand. The only thing you could do is to create speaker groups in advance in the app. But this results in many groups if you want to cover all possible combinations. Having two Spotify Account (my wife and mine) running in parallel is also not possible - you have to switch between them first. I kinda rebuild a control for Alexa in Home Assistant which worked okish but was still very hacky since you can’t send urls to these Echo’s directly. Instead you send a “silent voice command” which sometimes work and sometimes doesn’t.
Now I am trying to love Music Assistant, which seems so far the best bet. However it seems that there are still some bugs to be sorted out. Group and ungrouping sometimes fails. Sometimes the speakers disappear and appear again. For me MA is already a big improvement over the above mentioned systems. However the WAF isn’t there yet and I can’t let my Wife use this system without me fixing little hick-ups every now and then.
What I’ve always been looking for is the Sonos usability without using Sonos, especially because I don’t wanna be locked in their eco-system and I wanna use my own Speakers from different brands. That’s basically it. But there’s always a trade-off between flexibility and usability, unfortunately.
Therefore I was thinking whether Wiim could be a feasible option until MA is maybe more mature. Wiim seems to have a great app (that’s what my wife needs :-)) and I do have the option to go for different outputs like my existing hifi and/or wireless speakers via multiple streaming protocols.
I guess I just give Wiim a try as being the controller/music library and see if it fulfills my needs. It looks like a very flexible solution with a decent app. And as you said, It can also be used as a MA player if I like.
Just a follow up on my journey of testing multiroom options.
I replaced the Raspberry Pi Zero’s by Wiim Mini devices. The Mini’s don’t use Squeezelite but Airplay.
As mterry pointed out, this is by far the most reliable multiroom setup so far. I can easily group and ungroup speakers (wiim minis) and there’s only a little gap in playback until it starts a synchronized playback in the group. Of course you need to find the right sync delay correction for each speaker but once this is done it plays quite nice.
Furthermore I realized that my Onkyo Receiver is capable of being an Airplay receiver which does work surprisingly well. Especially in comparision to it’s own flare connect protocol.
Deactivating Squeezelite as a player provider made Music Assistant also more stable and the turning ring in the upper right is not always active anymore. Don’t know what’s the reason for that but that just an observation.
Last but not least, even with Airplay there are some things to watch out for. Apparently some devices/speakers which are Airplay 2 capable are not backwards-compatible to Airplay 1 as they actually should be.
I bought a JBL Charge 5 Wifi which was able to connect to Music Assistant but I couldn’t get it to play any music. Therefore I returned it and got an Edifier D32 which is a great speaker with Airplay capabilities and it does work wit MA just fine - beside the little issue that the hardware buttons on the devices don’t change the volume in MA. But that not such a big deal for me.
Seems like one gotta try for each new speaker and see if it works.
So far my setup looks like this:
Wiim Mini connected to Echo Studio via Line-in
Wiim Mini connected to Echo via Line-in
Edifier D32
Onkyo TX-L50
Raspberry pi4 with a hifiberry amp2 for running two independent mono channels - still testing
Especially in comparision to it’s own flare connect protocol.