For the past few years I’ve been building and maintaining website/blog at www.pragmaticcoding.ca. It has mostly about programming, and more specifically it’s ended up having a lot of content about JavaFX with Kotlin.
Lately, I’ve been spending all of my time building out my own homelab and self-hosting the services that I need. I’ve got a little stack of M910Q’s running in a Proxmox cluster with an HP T740 running OPNSense.
One of my big successes so far has been to replace my Google Home devices streaming music all over the house with a SnapCast network using RaspberryPi Zeros as the streaming clients. I’ve been working on documenting how to do this, and the result is a three part series that explains what SnapCast is, how it works and how to combine it with Mopidy to stream music around the house.
I have to admit that this one got away from me. It was all one article until I noticed that Jekyll was estimating it at oven 1/2 hour to read, which is way, way too long. So it became three parts, which also gives me the opportunity to release it over time, and make sure that each part is nice and clean before I post it live. Part I is an introduction to SnapCast and explains how it works and how to set up a SnapCast server in Proxmox.
If you’re interested, take a read and let me know what you think.
And you did it all in time just to have it be upended by SendSpin - which can even run on an ESP32 level MCU so you don’t even need a Pi Zero.
I’ll wait to see.
Apparently you can run SnapCast on an ESP32 also. For me, the Pi0’s cost about $20 CDN, and the DAC card about the same, and the delivery from PiShop.ca was about 3 days. ESP32 would have cost less, but then require some kind of housing because of the two components flopping around. The Pi DAC’s slip onto the GPIO pins and the pair are essentially 1 thing at that point. Mine are just tucked away behind whatever the amps are.
I point out in Part II or III that these are essentially appliances once they’re set up. As long as they do the job, I don’t expect to upgrading them on a regular basis or anything like that. SendSpin looks cool because it does other stuff besides just stream music, but I’m not looking for that. From what I can see, SendSpin runs on Pi’s too, so it should be fairly simple to add that to the Pi0’s in the future if that’s what I want.
Check out https://www.crowdsupply.com/sonocotta/esparagus-audio-brick
You can buy ESP32 boards with built in DACs, just FYI.
Also there’s a handful of Pi Zero shaped ESP3 boards as well, which you could use with the existing DACs.
But again my point was that Sendspin requires even less hardware than Snapcast (and while technically you can indeed run Snapcast on an ESP32, last I checked it uses up a lot of resources, making the ESPHome given extras like BT proxy and usage in real time BT based location, unusable).
Ooh, didn’t know about this one. Have you used it?
This seems like an end to Snapcast: https://github.com/orgs/music-assistant/discussions/3883
I am using it on a handful of devices (mainly voice interfaces), and it’s quite seamless, even in the beta stage.
Not up to Sonos level controls yet, but it’s getting there slowly. Music Assistant is gaining a lot of UX improvements recently, so it will be soon a viable alternative to not just SnapCast but Sonos too.
Yes, I saw that comment. I wasn’t sure what “But… it has so many downsides…” meant, and the comment doesn’t clarify.
To me, the big question is how the “improvements” they are going to make would my installation better. I suspect that most of the improvements are ones that allow them to make Music Assistant better, or allow them to add tighter integration with Music Assistant.
As far as I know, they haven’t rolled it out yet. But that thread is almost a year old now.
I would be interested to see what they’ve done.