Hi all!
I am replacing a squeezebox classic proactively, since it is quite old and has become somewhat flakey of late. The sb classic has worked well for 10 years and together with the ipeng app, I was able to control it very well for a whole house system with 4 rooms + outside speakers (for our short summer). I have moved from managing a large mp3 and flac collection to mostly using spotify.
After configuring a piCoreplayer for a friend to work like my squeezebox does with piCoreplayer and Logitech Media Server (LMS) for which he mostly just uses spotify, I thought there must be a better way. That setup is fragile and the LMS spotify plugins seem to only use libspotify which seems to be deprecated and things like playlists work unreliably.
So I found volumio which seems simpler and less complicated to do the same thing. A quick proof of concept with an old RPi (original model 1A) I had laying around seemed to work. Along the way, I discovered the difference between using a plugin to play spotify via the volumio interface, which is what I thought I wanted to do, and using the volumio device as a spotify player. Brilliant! That makes it much easier to just use the spotify app to play via the volumio player.
I do intend to mount some of my old music as there are things not on spotify that I like to play, but the spotify playback is used most by myself and my family.
Challenges I had setting up volumio the first time were mostly around how to get plugins installed and working. I could not find good documentation on this aspect of the setup. I eventually got it working but am still unclear on the difference between the Spotify plugin and Volumio Spotify Connect ver1.5.7 plugin I have installed. If I sort all that out I intend to create a howto for configuring the type of system I am working to building.
Another longer term project to to move my rack of equipment into the basement where I can control source and volume for each room independently via an app on a phone or tablet (typically apple devices for me). My current string of receivers using tape monitor out of one to the aux in of another to accomplish multi-room volume control is a bit of a hack and hard to control each room remotely.
Long intro, I know. I will ask and offer in these forums along the way as I have questions or figure things out.
Thanks for all the work done thus far on what looks like a solid project.
-jim
Seriously though, this open source software with plugins is a potentially extremely powerful thing, limited only by our imagination (ok, and some programming skills)).