Ooh, didn’t know about this one. Have you used it?
This seems like an end to Snapcast: github.com/orgs/music-assistant/discussions/3883
Comment on New Article - Whole Home Audio with SnapCast
fonix232@fedia.io 4 weeks ago
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.
Cyber@feddit.uk 4 weeks ago
fonix232@fedia.io 4 weeks ago
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.
HamsterRage@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
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.
HamsterRage@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
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.
paperd@lemmy.zip 4 weeks ago
Check out www.crowdsupply.com/…/esparagus-audio-brick
fonix232@fedia.io 4 weeks ago
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).