Show HN: Multi-room audio with Snapcast and Raspberry Pi

I use Snapcast and mopidy on a home server with the iris front end. It integrates with home assistant so you can have automations play sounds in all or some rooms.<p>With covid I&#x27;ve been able to pipe my meetings to snapcast from the web browser (listen only) which is great for restroom breaks and snacks in long unengaging meetings.<p>I rigged up a AC sniffer circuit and wifi microcontroller to my dumb doorbell which snapcasts a recording of a doorbell chime throughout the house when it&#x27;s pressed so I can hear it when music is playing.<p>Snapcast can also stream to a phone, so I can Bluetooth into the hot tub speakers and have it on the whole house audio too.<p>Open source home automation with home assistant and this tech is really fun if you want to get into it as a hobby. Certainly requires work, but that&#x27;s fun for me.<p>I also have it all integrated into a home-brew weather station and an indoor air quality sensor system with co2 and pm levels so I can get alerts to open windows or turn on fans if co2 gets too high. I also get raindrop noises when it starts raining so I go close the windows. Fun times.<p>Of course there&#x27;s a security system involved too which arms at night and when the family&#x27;s WiFi all disconnects. It disarms automatically based on WiFi auth and an openwrt script, so it&#x27;s totally autonomous. Works very well.<p>Working on a tensorflow based automation now to have the front door camera detect packages and send email alerts. Does not work at all, yet.<p>All local, all self-hosted, with a bridged MQTT server on a VPS for communicating with my location tracker and my mom&#x27;s house (I get alerts if she&#x27;s on vacation and the furnace dies or basement floods or there&#x27;s a break in or whatever). I vpn in to my router to control things when out. But if internet dies at home, everything local still works great.<p>Mopidy also connects to Spotify, of course.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mopidy.com&#x2F;ext&#x2F;iris&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mopidy.com&#x2F;ext&#x2F;iris&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.home-assistant.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.home-assistant.io&#x2F;</a>

After kicking around a bunch of these solutions and discovering that none of them work quite right or you still have to spend quite a bit on the hardware, I eventually bent the knee to Sonos recently. The interface is pretty garbage, but it just works and the sound quality is good.<p>Part of it was that I just don’t think I could face the wrath of my family when it didn’t work. I guess you get to a point in life when you have kids, and hours for tinkering are reduced so you need to pick your battles.<p>I like the Snapcast model though, it follows the Linux philosophy. From memory the audio stream is basically just wrapped along with a time stamp. Then you transfer those blocks to another device that plays them at the right time (where they’re unwrapped back into an audio stream).

Volumio’s pi OS is a pretty easy way to do this. There’s a Snapcast plugin on github along with instructions. Pair the pi with a hifiberry amp and some speakers and you’ve got your own custom networked audio client.<p>We’ve got sync’d audio running in 4 different rooms at home and control via home assistant. Not as easy as Sonos I’m sure but I like that I can use whatever speakers I want.

I&#x27;ve recently had some time to go through a spate of &quot;home improvement&quot; (needless tinkering) tech projects.<p>Replacing alexa and ok google devices with open source ones was on the list. This looks great for the music - though I was mainly stuck for good voice control.

The holy grail for cheap-ass networked audio is a surround-sound set constructed from random (or a set of) Bluetooth speakers and some sort of wireless receiver. I can&#x27;t tell you how many people came into my old workplace expected that to be possible, and being disappointed that the only options were somewhat expensive demi-audiophile WiFi-based (read: hooked into an app that required an internet connection and sometimes iOS) solutions from Sonos&#x2F;Bose&#x2F;B&amp;W&#x2F;Klipsch that locked you into their platform. IIUC latency and bandwidth are an issue?<p>This is a cool step in the right direction though.

Snapcast seems to also have integrations with Airplay and Home Assistant. This post is also quite nice, I&#x27;ve saved it to use as reference for whenever I get around to setting up Snapcast.

Nice article you can hook up studio monitors like genelec 8010 for a very good sounding setup. Monitors will Likely last a lifetime so better for the environment.

This looks like an interesting project. I found the naming creative: (S)y(n)chronous (a)udio (p)layer.