PipeWire 1.2 Can Stream To Snapcast Servers For Multi-Room Audio

[phoronix]

Phoronix: PipeWire 1.2 Can Stream To Snapcast Servers For Multi-Room Audio

Following the recent PipeWire 1.2 release candidate, a second release candidate is out today that also includes the ability to stream to Snapcast servers...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/PipeWire-1.2-RC2

[GraysonPeddie]

Sounds like a fun project to do when it comes to setting up multi-room audio with Pipewire and Snapcast.

[ayumu]

Bad link for snapcast. That's a dead fork, not upstream.

Try this: https://github.com/badaix/snapcast?tab=readme-ov-file

Notice the git repo has recent activity, vs 7 years ago.

OPUS support is a notable difference in the readme.

[Quackdoc]

ill have to try this, i've been quite dissapointed with LAN audio for pipewire before

[Frenzie]

ill have to try this, i've been quite dissapointed with LAN audio for pipewire before

Setting up this snapcast contraption sounds like a bit of a pain or worse compared to how in Pulse you can just select a network-exposed server for output. Depends on what you're looking for I suppose.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

This "sounds" interesting. I have full on computers hooked up to each TV we have so I guess I could use this. I'm curious what the typical set up is like though. Full home theater PCs like I would do, or maybe just a raspberry pi hooked up to an AVR in each room they wanted music in?

[panikal]

This "sounds" interesting. I have full on computers hooked up to each TV we have so I guess I could use this. I'm curious what the typical set up is like though. Full home theater PCs like I would do, or maybe just a raspberry pi hooked up to an AVR in each room they wanted music in?

From the webpage:

The Snapserver reads PCM chunks from the pipe /tmp/snapfifo. The chunk is encoded and tagged with the local time. Supported codecs are:

• PCM lossless uncompressed
• FLAC lossless compressed [default]
• Vorbis lossy compression

The encoded chunk is sent via a TCP connection to the Snapclients. Each client does continuos time synchronization with the server, so that the client is always aware of the local server time. Every received chunk is first decoded and added to the client’s chunk-buffer. Knowing the server’s time, the chunk is played out using ALSA at the appropriate time.

Sounds like you could do both if you really wanted, paying attention to supported codecs.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

From the webpage:

Sounds like you could do both if you really wanted, paying attention to supported codecs.

Thanks, I had read that. I'm mostly curious what people's real world setups look like for the "I want an open source Sonos like setup" use case.

[luciferin]

I can chime in a bit. I've been using Snapcast for years. I use it to stream music from my Linux server throughout my house to multiple clients whenever I have guests over. My server will send whatever stream my PC is playing to my Fire Sticks, to my Sony TV, and to my cell phone. I also have a client running on my Raspberry Pi openWRT box with an 1/8", this feeds some speakers I have outside. Snapcast handles keeping the music in sync, with a configurable delay.

I'm excited for this PipeWire change, because the hardest part of setting up Snapcast is setting up the source pipes. Everything else is entirely plug and play.

[Quackdoc]

This "sounds" interesting. I have full on computers hooked up to each TV we have so I guess I could use this. I'm curious what the typical set up is like though. Full home theater PCs like I would do, or maybe just a raspberry pi hooked up to an AVR in each room they wanted music in?

I use sonobus for high fidelity audio for medium-large spaces where it's not feasible to just wire up a bunch of speaker wire since it fits perfectly into network/telephone lines