Word of advice: get good wifi hardware

[BerlinJoker]

Hi, just in case someone else who is trying to get a stable stream going finds this: make sure to get good and stable wifi hardware. I tried optimising buffer settings, stream codecs, switched to esps with more psram and external wifi antennas, andandand, and STILL ran into choppy audio again and again. I knew that the 2.4ghz band was flooded in our building, but as we never had issues otherwise (movie streaming worked fine, video calls worked fine, ...), I tried out everything else first. The moment I switched to a uptodate wifi access point all my snapcast issues were gone. Also allowed me to move the devices with bigger data needs (phones, laptops, ...) to the 5ghz band, with now only the IoT/smarthome stuff and the snapcast esps using 2.4ghz. (side note: it also turned out that my old access point was reaching its performance limits related to the number of connected devices...)
Long story short: if you're close to giving up on getting a stable stream, make sure you have proper wifi hardware. Good luck, it's worth it :)