pi-multiroom-radio-ansible

This is a (personal) playbook to configure my multi-room radio/Spotify HiFi system. Running on MPD, Snapcast, librespot-java and lirc. Built over frustration of missing features or configurability in the existing pre-built systems such as RuneAudio, Volumio, Pi MusicBox or Moode.

At some point I realised, it was quicker to just build the system myself. Using Ansible I can easily reproduce such a configuration and keep it manageable.

Hopefully these playbooks can also offer some inspiration to you.

Rationale

I like to play internet radio and Spotify (Connect) in a multi-room setup. The radio part I'm mostly controlling via a traditional remote control, connected via a simple infrared eye on one of the Pi's.

• For spotify librespot is the obvious choice.
  • Using the nice wrapper raspotify to daemonize librespot
  • Spotifyd was tempting, because it would allow control of playback via MPRIS
    • But named pipe output is currently broken. Making Snapcast setup difficult
• For Spotify, I've switched to librespot-java
  • Only reason is the built-in API, which can easily be called from irexec for remote control
  • The librespot-java API also can pass through requests to the Spotify API. Also useful
• For internet radio classic MPD is being used
  • I started with Mopidy, but run into issues with a very slow startup (10 s) to start an internet stream.
    • Also mpc commands were relatively slow (2 s) to execute.
    • For my usecase I didn't need the Mopidy features, so I switched to the simpler MPD.
    • I kept the Ansible playbook task file, in case I want to switch back
  • Using mpdbear for Android to control MPD from my phone.
  • Volume control is entirely in Snapcast. I don't touch the MPD (or librespot) volume.
• Multi-room is achieved using Snapcast
  • Using the software mixer on all systems, and then fine-tuning the hardware (ALSA) mixers to a nice level gave me the best equal response in volume.
  • The snap_default.py script is being run to reset the Snapcast volume on every (nightly) reboot for all clients (no surprises in the morning)
    • Added as ExecStartPost to the Systemd service file
  • Both MPD and librespot pipe their output into the same named pipe. This makes the setup easier to understand.
    • This does mean that MPD and librespot should not play at the same time.
    • Librespot executes the mpc_stop.sh script using the --onevent handler
    • The other way around, I've not found a good way to stop librespot when MPD starts.
      • I did include a simple sudo service librespot-java restart to execute on the remote control power button
  • Using Snapdroid for Android to control Snapcast
• Using lirc to have my simple remote control working
  • The infrared eye has been connected on 3 GPIO pins (add dtoverlay=gpio-ir,gpio_pin=17 to /boot/config.txt)
  • Getting the remote to work using irrecord can be a bit of a pain.
  • I looked at using uevent for processing events, but in the end defaulted to the simpler irexec for sending commands
  • Most of the command magic is in irexec.lircrc.
    • Using python-snapcast to control the Snapcast volume
    • Created simple scripts snap_mute.py and snap_volume.py to control the muting and volume of the Snapcast clients

Base configuration pi

Running on Raspberry Pi OS Lite (Raspbian 11 (bullseye)).

Enable SSH and WiFi

touch /boot/ssh

/boot/wpa_supplicant.conf

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
country=NL

network={
     ssid="<SSID>"
     psk="<PASSWORD>"
     scan_ssid=1
}

raspi-config

Run sudo raspi-config. Enable:

• Wait for network to boot
• Install nl_NL.UTF8 locale
• Expand SD card

Set options in /boot/config.txt

Disable most of the HMDI options.

For kitchen (a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W with HifiBerry Zero AMP)

dtparam=act_led_trigger=actpwr
hdmi_blanking=2
dtoverlay=hifiberry-dac

For living (a Raspberry Pi 3 with HifiBerry MiniAMP)

dtoverlay=hifiberry-amp
dtoverlay=gpio-ir,gpio_pin=17
dtoverlay=disable-wifi
dtoverlay=disable-bt

Setup authentication

• Change default password.
• Add personal SSH key

TODO

• Maybe include PiHole to set persistent hostnames, and not having to use IPs.
  • Why-o-why is zeroconf/avahi still so unreliable, and not enabled on Android??