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.
Thanks for sharing.
I’ll take a proper read if it later, but how well do your Pi0’s stay on the wifi?
I have 4 around my home acting as bluetooth trackers for Home Assistant, but they fall off the wifi often (signal strength / noise isn’t the issue)
It’s only for a few seconds, which is ok for BT tracking, but that would be terrible for audio.
Did you I know music assistant can use snapcast as media device and so can announce and play music?
Snapcast is great, I use it with MPD for synced whole house audio
I wonder how this compares with https://lyrion.org/, formerly Logitech SqueezeBox server.
Thanks for that. Read Pt1 and it all makes sense.
I’ve found that Music Assistant has worked well for group casting audio for me with Google Minis and Chromecast Audios. Although I’ve not had it running all day, but it has removed the hassle of it stopping from WiFi disconnects from my phone.
Always looking for new ways to do things, so will look out for pts 2 & 3.
Music assistant has a snapcast server builtin, so you could replace all your Google devices with snapcast clients
I’ve got whole home audio. 150 watts…just crank that bitch up. LOL Never heard of SnapCast but I bookmarked the link for later on this evening. I like the site. Very clean and easily readable.
If you’re old enough and you live in North America, you probably remember Ronco
Ron Popeil…very interesting pitch man/entrepreneur. His infomercials were cheesier than Wisconsin, but you remember them.
Thank you for sharing
