Man squeezebox (slimproto)1 is really good! I have a rpi2 that I installed picoreplayer on, it is a small program that can play music over the speakers2. It is great, I have several pis lying around that I do not use anymore3, and this is a good way to use them.
When I send a command to play music with music assistant the rpi starts playing within a second. I also have a few Sonos speakers and they take almost twice as long to play music.
Music assistant is a really nice project, it plays4 from my spotify and all the cd’s I ripped over the years. And it plays it over all sorts of speakers5, and it integrates with home-assistant.
I now have several automations that play music when I want over the speakers I want.
home assistant with music assistant makes useful and silly things possible:
- Play the imperial march (star wars) when your father-in-law enters the house? possible
- Turn on christmas music and turn on the christmas tree with one button? possible
- Play band-aid on all speakers and deliver world peace? seems to be broken at the moment
I don’t really know, or care really, but there are many names for this thing , it is called squeezelite, I think the device is called squeezebox, the protocol is called slimproto. ↩︎
The pi runs piCorePlayer, it uses slimproto (a streaming protocol for music). ↩︎
I loved the raspberry pi’s when they came out, but they are not super reliable over years. There were random crashes, sd card failures etc. ↩︎
It plays from local files, internet radio, apple music, deezer, soundcloud, spotify, plex, siriusxm, subsonic, youtube music and more. But I don’t have all of those services. ↩︎
It plays over airplay, DNLA, google cast, slimproto, sonos and more ↩︎