Happy to be among you guys, I’ve just set Volumio on an used Rpi 3B+, I’ve been able to mount my NAS personal music, install YTmusic plugin in litterally no time, thanks to a clean and well-built UI.
Since five years, I’m using Mopidy with the Iris frontend and snapserver with some RPi’s around the house with snapclient. Pretty satisfying for a free software. Still, there are caveats :
As nice as Iris can be, ergonomy is not the most outstanding feature. It can be really frustrating when you have to click a tiny arrow on a smartphone to switch sources.
YTMusic is no longer maintained
Even if it was, the UI lack responsiveness and dedicated sections/categories for YTMusic
Then I stumbled upon Volumio, whereas I was looking for an alternative.
I’ve looked through the docs, and felt I had to try it. Some threads are mentionning Snapcast as an available option, but I also see that there is an embedded version of multiroom audio with the premium plan.
So my questions now :
I see that the premium plan allow to use multiroom through Chromecast, but is there a way to use my RPI’s as clients ? They don’t have Chromecasts embedded. Basically, I wouldn’t bother using newer and shiny bluetooth speakers if Volumio reveals to be a great experience, of which I am kinda sure it will be the case.
Am I limited to a single instance ? I’d need at least two different streams at the same time (eg. my children and me can listen to different music in my actual setup)
Just out of curiosity, why is it limited to 6 devices ?
Any plans to make it easier to run on virtual machines ? I’ve been able to run a testing instance but was kinda weird, as it needed additional steps I’ve never needed to proceed on elsewhere.
The thing is, the WAF seems really high on Volumio, and that’s one of my most important criteria, so it could definitely be something. Thanks for you time !
Yes, you can use rpis, i have 6 total. works way better than any other multiroom solution i’ve tried (any i could find). don’t know about possibility of different streams, sorry…
This part is not correct. I have a (single) premium plan and multiroom capacity which works extremely well (typically grouping three devices in three rooms, all running volumio).
Premium plan for each node? not sure what you mean there. I started with one month of premium plan to test multiroom; after a month of testing with 6 devices (all rpi4s) i did a yearly plan because it worked well. can’t comment on snapcast…in response to another question you had about multiple multirooms, i don’t think you can do that but pretty sure you can do one multiroom with other single nodes.
@fearceoil@Cliff_Pankonien Thanks for your answers. I made a mistake in my previous statement. I did not mean “volumio nodes” but RPi nodes, I was initially thinking the volumio “server” was embedding Snapserver to which I could have been connected through Snapclient with my RPi’s. But there is no Snapcast instance running on Volumio premium natively.
I understand now that I have to flash as many RPi’s as wanted nodes in different rooms. Let’s just confirm how it works, do I have to connect to the volumio client instance and tap “Play here” ? Or does the second instance of Volumio (free) appear as an output in the “Cast to” menu ?
neither. i think of it as one master and some number of slaves. pick one for a master, then click on the lower-right icon, looks kinda like two speakers superimposed. then click “grouping” and the other devices should show up, you add them to the group there. then whatever you play on the “master” (for want of a better term) will play on the other nodes. you have to activate volumio on the other devices in your profile, and then enable “multiroom playback” under the “sources” menu on the master device. then add nodes to the group. haven’t done it in a while but that should be close…
Right. Just one clarification – different volumio devices can act as the master (the lead device) on different occasions. Say, for instance, I have a music source in Kitchen that is not on the other devices (on a USB drive, say, or in the internal storage space); I can queue that music, then click the bottom-right-corner icon labelled Kitchen on the playback page, then click Grouping and the other volumio devices on the local network appear as options. Add or remove devices as you want to your play-group and then click the Play icon and the music plays simultaneously on the selected volumio devices. The point being that there is no single dedicated server for multiroom playback – any one of the volumio devices can take the lead, so to speak. That bottom-right-hand corner icon, when clicked, also reveals the `Cast’ submenu. That menu lists all of the cast devices (your TV or whatever) that volumio detects on the local network. I’ve never used this option, but I assume that it allows you to direct the music stream to any of those (non-volumio) devices. HTH
