RasPi Local / Remote Music Playback
Hi good people... just looking for some feedback ...
I have a couple of Raspberry Pi 3 with audio amp outputs (one has a touchscreen as well).
They're currently running Volumio (v2) which we can control remotely with our phones, but that software is old, insecure, and could really do with an update...
Volumio (v4) doesn't inspire me much, plus, it's good to check out the alternatives.
So, I'm looking at replacing the local-audio playback with perhaps Moode ... or maybe piCorePlayer and perhaps adding Navidrome for remote access??
I'd need to be able to play radio streams too, with a sleep timer / wakeup function, so not sure if that's a deal breaker (it's hard to find these features on their websites)
Any alternatives that others can suggest (rAudio?) or other feedback?
Or am I ahead of the curve and I have found the Best Solution™️?
TIA
18 replies
I’m in the process of building a multi-room audio system atm.
Snapserver/snapclients for the streaming audio, 1 audio stream with mpd to be set as 24/7 music, 1 for podcasts, 1 for alerts.
Alerts interrupt both streams to play the alerts. PI 4 for the main audio stack, first speaker, 2nd PI zero w/pirate radio hat/2 5w speakers for the portable speaker that should run most of the day on battery.
PodFetch gets the podcasts, script creates a playlist each day to play the oldest podcasts first. Although kinda surprised PodFetch doesn’t seem to let me do this.
Once it all runs smoothly i’ll put PI Zero W’s/Speakers in the other room and then going to build a 7” esp32 display to allow selecting which speaker plays which stream. Maybe later do something where each stream plays a different genre.
Nice.
I've had a lot of problems with Pi Zero W(2?) falling off the wifi.
Not sure if it's because I'm using them for bluetooth presence detection, so they're scanning all day... but it's put me right off using them for something like music.
YMMV
I run my own unifi setup so network stuff spread over a number of devices so don’t really have much of an issue. The zero’s only do audio streaming though on minimal os that can’t phone home or update and they seem ok so far but atm i’m still breaking stuff while i tweak stuff, lol
But when i leave them alone to play they seem to do fine. I mean they should all cache a few seconds of audio so drop outs aren’t an issue, the problem with most wifi is likely too many devices on 1 AP or poor reconnect coding which unifi seem pretty good with. 😎
Yeah, I have 3 Ruckus APs scattered around the house and the devices are on their own SSID which I've VLANd off and blocked from the internet... until it's time to do updates.
The Zeros are in far corners of the house to get a better idea of which location people are with the Bluetooth detection, but in the end I just had to throttle their bandwidth (in the Zeros) and they seem more stable now... hopefully won't impact you, so it's just an FYI 🙂
I recently did a rpi media player project and tried volumio, picoreplayer, moode, and others. I ultimately settled on installing android from konstakang.com. It was so much easier to set up imo for my use case, which was a focus on local music playback and keeping the files sync’d via my LAN. It even supported my hat DAC and my remote control.
Playing around with it today, I've found Moode works fine...except for the 3.5" touchscreen... it literally turns off the power to the screen (which is showing a CLI login prompt) when I enable the WebUI.
Notneven heard of konstakang, so I'll check it out.
I once ran subsonic in jukebox mode with snapcast to make it multi room, I know home assistant has music assistant that can also use snapcast to do multi room.
Ooh, good point about Home Assistant / Music Assistant... I hadn't considered that.
I have HA running the house, and really, I just didn't see the point of Music Assistant when it first came out... maybe worth re-visiting. Not looked to see if that can stream remotely, but I guess it's possible ...
You can use something like tailscale for remote access if you aren't already set up for it otherwise. Then you can use music assistant to stream to your phone (as a snap target) and play that in your car or whatever.
I like picoreplayer.
Tried moode, but i think picore is a bit more flexible.
Yeah, I installed it again yesterday...
Seems really unintuitive after the initial setup steps (which do a good job of walking you through the initial setup), so I did bork it up once.
I think the hardest point for me is that it's based on Tiny Core Linux, so I can't install anything else (ie even
tmux), so I'm having issues with getting the touchscreen working.I'll try Moode today...
Also, I have a touchscreen going :)
I added tmux packages for 32 and 64 bit pi a few months back.
They need you to install a utf8 compatible locale though.
Hmmm, ok, I'll try it again...
And the touchscreen 👍🏻
Have you looked at lyron? (lyrion.org),it works on multiple platforms and has mutiroom support. I use it with my old squeeze box and can stream from my desktop
Thats what picoreplayer is based on.
Tiny core linux + lyrion
Kindof, if I understand correctly, that's part of piCorePlayer:
https://docs.picoreplayer.org/components/
TBH, when I tried piCorePlayer a few years ago, it felt like a bunch of things duct-taped together, so I don't really know which bits were which.... maybe I'll try lyrion separately...
Thats what picoreplayer is based on.
Tiny core linux + lyrion