Multi-room audio systems?

[Moon Cricket]

Can someone who is a bit more tech-savvy than me (basically anyone) help me find a home audio system or set-up matches my requirements?

I want to be able to play the same music seamlessly to all speakers in the house.
I also want the ability to have different songs playing in different rooms.
I am not an audio snob, I don’t want to pay through the nose for super high quality speakers.
I want the speakers to be small enough to sit on shelves etc definitely not hardwired in to the walls or ceilings.
I want to be able to play radio Stations.
I do not want to have to pay for any sort of streaming service,
I need the ability to play my own music library stored on my PC (that mostly consists of crappy mp3 files that I worked very hard to pirate back in the day). Happy to transfer my music to a new dedicated device.
I don’t have a “smart home“ and I don’t want google etc to be spying on me and selling my data Etc.
I want an app on my phone/ipad or a stand alone dedicated tablet thing to control the system from.
I don't want to pay too much.

Dos something like this exist?

Been getting rather frustrated, because the ones that I like the look of the most are part of the smart assistant home ranges like Google, Amazon and Apple. I trust Apple a bit more with security so maybe I could be okay with voice activated stuff if it was Apple…. But it sounds like the homepod minis won’t work with my music library anyways.

If someone could point me in the direction of where to look, I would be so appreciative.

 

[Un Platano]

The 'smart' home way to do it is to buy one of many systems that essentially work out of the box to do what you're asking for, but those come at the cost that they are all reliant on constantly being connected to some third party framework for basic functionality. Sonos has it right in their ToS that they're going to brick your devices one day and probably every other manufacturer has similar reservations.

The opposite end is the dumb home way which is to run a shitload of cables everywhere. This is the tried and true reliable way to do it, but you're necessarily giving up functionality. Some people will swear that they're fine with being tethered to a control board, or at best a remote control in the stereo room to do everything they want and that all this smart stuff is superfluous garbage, but I think that's a kneejerk reaction to the anti consumer practices that IoT companies have adopted. There's a lot of genuinely useful features that these smart home stereo systems introduce that discrediting the entire concept is borne of contrarianism.

So where does that leave us? The dilemma is that we want a hardware system that is seamlessly integrated into a smart device, yet we want to retain full control over that device. And whenever we have a problem like that, someone has probably come up with a solution using a Raspberry Pi. And sure enough, there's actually a lot of ways you can set up a Pi to work as a multi room audio system. I've never done this myself so I can't give you any recommendations for specific setups, but I strongly encourage you to look into raspberry pi multi room audio setups if you want these kinds of audio setups without the 3rd party bullshit that all of the current solutions come with.

The cost of this is that some fuckery will be required to actually get it set up, because while some people go to great lengths to make their Pi applications user friendly these setups are never going to work properly the first time you plug them in. That's just how it is with these kinds of projects and that's the reason why most people are buying a home assistant and calling it a day.

 

[teriyakiburns]

You can start with snapcast. It offers a way to reliably stream synchronised, multi-room audio from single sources. There are a few projects that use it in one way or another. I have a half-baked implementation that uses a couple of raspberry pis acting as clients (currently with hifiberryos, but I want to roll my own when I have the chance) and some old speakers, mopidy, a mopidy UI called Iris, and a tablet to act as a control panel.

 

[Boss Nigger]

That was quite the list of requirement. I don't know how tech literate you are. I can only tell you what I would do.

someone has probably come up with a solution using a Raspberry Pi.

This is the right idea. I would get a RPI and load it up with home assistant (HA). There are literally a fuck ton of videos on how to do this. this will be your controller. it will integrate with your music and your speakers. you will be able to setup zones in HA so if you only want to play music in your living room you can do that via the HA app or voice integration (non spyware edition thats complex though) or the entire house that would be possible

this guide is comprehensive but these guys are audiophile faggots so ignore their speaker requirements. when you go to the HA integration site, after finding what speakers you want to buy. make sure it says LOCAL push/pull. like this i really like sonos they have good integrations and its very easy but convenience has a price. you should really read the sonos page.

as for hosting your music. you can use plex (normie friendly, or jellyfin autist friendly)

this might be good for you, i have not watched this video, I just saw his mouth open ready to receive cock face. and thought he must be normie friendly

 

[Un Platano]

That was quite the list of requirement. I don't know how tech literate you are. I can only tell you what I would do.

This is the right idea. I would get a RPI and load it up with home assistant (HA). There are literally a fuck ton of videos on how to do this. this will be your controller. it will integrate with your music and your speakers. you will be able to setup zones in HA so if you only want to play music in your living room you can do that via the HA app or voice integration (non spyware edition thats complex though) or the entire house that would be possible

this guide is comprehensive but these guys are audiophile faggots so ignore their speaker requirements. when you go to the HA integration site, after finding what speakers you want to buy. make sure it says LOCAL push/pull. like this i really like sonos they have good integrations and its very easy but convenience has a price. you should really read the sonos page.

as for hosting your music. you can use plex (normie friendly, or jellyfin autist friendly)

this might be good for you, i have not watched this video, I just saw his mouth open ready to receive cock face. and thought he must be normie friendly

The one requirement out of that list that's hard to meet is receiving radio. It's not that it's hard to find stereo amps that will receive radio, but that it's going to be difficult to integrate it into a smart home audio system. In these Pi setups the amplifiers are dumb devices that simply boost whatever audio signal the Pi is putting out, so we can't make a way for the pi to change the amplifier over to the radio setting (unless we can control the amplifier through the GPIO, but that's a whole different can of worms). We could set up a dedicated radio receiver hooked up to a line in on the Pi, but there's still no way to change the channel without physically changing it on the receiver. Finally there are options for plugging a radio receiver directly into the Pi, but those are jank as all hell and most likely well above the level of technical expertise that OP wants to put into this. Even if he did get it set up he'd have to remote in to the pi's console to make it work every time because integrating a radio receiver into a media center is one thing that probably hasn't been done on a Pi before. It's a clumsy solution both in the hardware and the software.

All this is to say that you'll have to make compromises for your radio. It is physically possible to broadcast FM radio to all of the speakers in your house over a raspberry pi, but at some point you'll be treading new ground and will have to learn quite a bit to make a working product. Alternatively you can forgo the smart home integration and control your radio the old fashioned way. There's no existing solution to this because the number of people who want to stream FM radio over a smart home network is vanishingly small.

 

[Boss Nigger]

The one requirement out of that list that's hard to meet is receiving radio.

My dumbass thought OP ment internet radio which is basically just like spotify. easy as shit to integrate. but yes FM, AM will be a nightmare i think its best to forgo that dream for now, and learn more about the RTL tech. im sure OP could buy some shit off aliexpress that might work

 

[Moon Cricket]

Thank you all so much for all of your replies. It sounds very much like I am not going to be able to actually buy a readymade system to suit my needs so I will take your advice and invest in some kind of RP and figure it our from there!

I am completely tech-retarded but I am frustrated with the mainstream multi-room audio companies and their shenanigans. So I will do it myself and not give them a penny

I guess I was naïve but it actually shocked me how basically all of the smart home stuff forces you to subscribe to it. You can’t just buy something and use it, you have to pay £100’s just to then pay X per month to have any sort of functionality. Fuck I hate that.

Thank you for the video @Boss Nigger. I am pretty sure I should be able to get what I need from the RP and learn something in the process.

I will probably just get a small standard portable radio at another time, if I still desire one later.

 

[Boss Nigger]

I will probably just get a small standard portable radio at another time, if I still desire one later.

this is a great idea and i completly missed it.

the RPI has an audio in interface. What you could do is buy an aux cable and plug it into radio OUT and into RPI audio IN. then you can connect your rpi audio in to home assistant. that way, you get whole house radio

 

[Moon Cricket]

this is a great idea and i completly missed it.

the RPI has an audio in interface. What you could do is buy an aux cable and plug it into radio OUT and into RPI audio IN. then you can connect your rpi audio in to home assistant. that way, you get whole house radio

That’s awesome! So I can fulfil every single thing that I wanted to achieve from a home audio setup.

We are moving from a tiny 1 bed apartment to an actual house. So whereas my current 1 room audio setup reached every corner of our apartment, it certainly won’t cut it when we move and have more rooms. Hence my conundrum.

Thanks man, I really appreciate your help.

 

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The one requirement out of that list that's hard to meet is receiving radio

Are there radio stations around which don't have web streams nowadays?

 

[XYZpdq]

I use synchtubes for my multi-room synch media.