Hard-core multiroom

Diy and Tweaks
#1

Hello all, I live a love story with volumio and snapcast since a few months…
I even fully redeveloped an UI on the NEEO diy remote using there excellent socket.io APi and jsonrpc for snapcast.
https://youtu.be/9Z_wd0l7iyM
(just to show I am not a complete noob).
BUT there is still a problem I can’t wrap my head around, it is the multi-stream multi-room.
Today I have great multi-room with one volumio and snapcast server playing to my various snapcast clients (Raspberries or old Android TV boxes) but I can play only ONE song to many endpoints, not many different songs…

My idea was to have multiple volumio instances in my various PIs and have the snapclient switch but the API doesn’t allow to do it.
Other option would be to have other mpd instances inside volumio but then, how to control these instances?
Finally a last option I can think of but going beyond my knowledge is to use lms as a server as it allows multiroom multistream apparently.
In this case, would that mean dropping volumio? Can I use it as a client?

#2

You can use LMS and use iPeng, that way you can send music to a lot of clients, via AirPlay, Chromecast and I belive even DNLA, you can also install the Squeezelite player and send music to your Volumio.

#3

You can only stream one instance of a player to one pipe output. I.e. one MPD instance can only output a single song to a single pipe.

You could however use various players: Spotify (possibly multiple instances), Tidal, Qobuz, MPD etc. and have them output to their own pipe. Then you would have x pipes containing music (by lack of better phrasing). Snapserver is able to serve multiple pipes to streams.

Then you are able to ‘subscribe’ any client to any of the streams and switch streams if and when you want.

Configuration wise it’s pretty complex and certainly not update proof. I think you should ask the question how often do you want to switch streams and/or aren’t you better off playing the different stream on the particular device itself? I haven’t touched this, because I rarely have different streams playing at a time. But in theory there must be a solid solution somewhere :wink:

#4

Yes, you can use Volumio as a client, if you use the airplay plugin on LMS. Works perfectly fine (I used that for a couple of weeks) but Volumio doesn’t add that much value anymore at that point. I have now switched to using squeezelite for all my players.
When using LMS you should use the Material skin though as the main controller. It’s not as sleek as Volumio, but still looks much better than LMS classic.

#5

Hello, thanks all for your replies. I missed the notifications so I am sorry for the delay to answer you. Well, at the end for having multiple instances of volumio streaming to snapcast, I tried to have multiple dockers. But somehow I didn’t managed. Lms could have been a good option certainly but finally I prefered go to the king ROON. I took a lifetime subscription so better use it…
I still use volumio as client with roon ready client as well as airplay as volumio has a very good support of hat and DACs…
my experience with roon is crazy good it really is a marvel.