Volumio output to external Snapcast Server

Volumio Information

Volumio Version:2.878
Hardware: Raspbery Pi Zero W
DAC: None

I have Volumio running on my Pi Zero with the Snapcast server plugin.
The audio at the snapcast client end is terrible, snaps and pos constantly.
I have another Snapcast server running on my network that is currently being used by my MPD server. The audio from this snapcast server is great.
I’m assuming the Pi 0 just don’t have enough processing power to run volumio and snapcast.

Is there a way I can output the audio from Volumio to my ‘external’ snapcast server? I assume this would lighten the load on the Pi 0

I know RPi0s are pretty amazing, but running Volumio & a snapcast server seems a bit optimistic :wink: . I think you need to just use it as a client. How are you using your current snapcast server? Would it be possible to run Volumio on another (more capable) device with the server there? In answer to your question though (eventually), I don’t think you can currently, but you might want to contact Saiyato (author of the plugin) for a more definitive answer.

Well I thought about trying it out on a Virtual Machine seeing as it’s easy to get one running, I’m short on available RPi’s :wink:
That was a quick aparent deadend, there is almost no docs for x86 Volumio and even less for booting up inside a VM, nearest I’ve been able to figure is that x86 Volumio is meant to be booted and run off a USB stick, terrible idea in my books but that might be me not understanding something.

Well I just stumbled across this piece of info on someone trying to pip audio from Rhasspy out to an ‘external’ mopidy/snapcast server

pipeline: gst-launch-1.0 -v fdsrc ! wavparse ! audioresample ! audioconvert ! audio/x-raw,rate=48000,channels=2,format=S16LE ! wavenc ! tcpclientsink host=192.168.IP.SERVER port=3333
(Stream audio to Snapcast server - Development - Rhasspy Voice Assistant)

Looks like I might have something to play with tonight.

Well good luck, and definitely report back here please. Linux often amazes me with it’s versatilty, but you’re getting well out of my comfort zone on the detail.:slight_smile:

yes, looks like it :wink:
An x86 boot device is not limited to a usb stick, with the Volumio 3 beta you can boot off any device from your hardware bios boot options, be it HDD/SSD/eMMC/NVME/USB or microSD.
The problem is that we do not promote running in a VM, not because it does not work (using Virtual Box for Volumio x86 development myself sometimes), but there is not enough expertise here to support VMs in general.

Well I sorted out my issue with the RPi Zero W. It has enough power to run Volumio and Snapserver.
The samplerates in sanapserver.conf and mpd.conf were different.

Snapserver.conf was set to 48000:16:2
Mpd.conf was set to 44100:16:2

I don’t know if I changed one at some point or not but as soon as I set snapserver.conf to 44100:16:2 the snaps and cracks vanished. There is the occasional click, or more likely a millisecond(s) blank in the audio stream which ends up sounding like a click.

I’ve seen some recomendations for RPi 0 to have this set to 44800:16:*
I’m not sure if that is just for playback with a Respeaker 2 Hat.

Well not completely, I don’t think Volumio 2 will install on a HDD but it is good to know 3 will.
I don’t know if VM’s need to be ‘officially’ supported, in most cases if it boots from an ISO and has an installer it ‘should’ just work in a VM.
I couldn’t get the Volumio x86.img working but it’s that it got corrupted in the initial download, the unzipping, or the upload to the ESXi Datastore.

In any case, I ended up getting Volumio and Snapserver running on my RPi 0 lastnight. I’m going to test it out with some Android clients today to see how it handles multiple connections.

it does, never had an issue with it, sometimes the copy to disk feature throws an error at the end, but it is mostly cosmetic, the system will boot from the installed HDD/SSD anyway. And with some linux cmd skills, dd-ing the image to the hdd from a running usb stick is easy. There are more ways to do this. With Volumio 3, the copy-to-disk has been re-written and works very fast and without issues, to any attached disk.