I have been dabbling with different OS’es and softwares for Pi 3 for my home stereo and finally landed here. I’m overall super satisfied with the soft, even though the install and first config was a bit hassle
I’d like to have different names for my bluetooth mode, airplay mode and spotify mode to make things a little bit more simple to use for my friends & family + make things more aesthetically pleasing.
I have googled in every possible way, but I can’t seem to find a way to rename only bluetooth, airplay or only spotify.
I know the BLUETOOTH_DEVICE_NAME variable doesn’t work anymore after some update… just DEVICE_NAME changes Bluetooth, Airplay AND Spotify device names.
So my question is:
Is it possible to change only Airplay name? or only Bluetooth name? or only Spotify Connect name?
Hey there! I think that what you want to accomplish can be done by setting differentDEVICE_NAME variable values per service (checkout the “Device service variables” menu at the left hand side of the balena dashboard). I think you could i.e. set one DEVICE_NAME for the airplay service, and another one for the spotify service
Thank you, I somehow didn’t find this anywhere - maybe I’m blind
Only the Spotify name one didn’t work, it disappeared completely after adding ‘device service variable’, but I removed the variable and used the regular DEVICE_NAME for it
Now I can’t get my Spotify connect to work at all, but it’s probably related to something different because I have changed a lot of settings meanwhile looking for the solution.
Thank you for the amazingly fast response, it’s a great community!
Glad to hear this part is working. What happened exactly with the spotify service DEVICE_NAME, were you unable to add that specific environment variable to the service?
When I added DEVICE_NAME to the ‘Device Service Variable’ the Spotify Connect just disappeared… Everything else was working. When I removed it and just left the overall device level variable DEVICE_NAME it showed up again.
Since I’m only using 3 sources total it’s fine, because I renamed the other 2, which meant that the device level name was left for Spotify (hope I make sense).
I also got Spotify Connect working & connecting after removing SPOTIFY_LOGIN & SPOTIFY_PASSWORD. I had the correct credentials and premium account. I’m okay now, because I don’t really see the usecase of sending music to my Hi-Fi over the internet, without me home, anyway
That is strange, are you sure the service was not simply restarting (this happens every time an env var is updated), anyway the solution you described makes sense and should work just fine.
Congratulations on getting it all up and running, let us know should you want to look further into the issues with the spotify service (either now or in the future), in the meantime enjoy your balena-sound device
Like, what am I missing out without using Spotify without the login feature (password & username in balenasound).
Like now I can get my stereo to play as a Spotify “speaker” when I’m at home, connected to my wifi and that’s good.
But I don’t see any scenario where I would want to play music out of my home stereo when I’m not connected to my home wifi or not home at all. I just don’t see the benefit of using Spotify Connect to a speaker that’s not near me
Hi Elton, yeah I guess you are right. You are not missing out on much. I’ve been using balenaSound A LOT over the past year as I’m one of the developers, and I mainly use it with Spotify but have never had the real need to use that feature. I can’t really think of a good use case for it, so that maybe speaks for itself and we should maybe look into removing it.
Ow, don’t remove it. While Googeling it I found out that for one guy finds it useful because of the multiroom or smth and he has speakers far back of his yard where he has a different wifi hotspot. So connecting via online is the best way for him - so there are uses, just really niche ones
Maybe just re-write the manual/guide and make it a ‘bonus’ feature?
Again, love the work you have done with it. I’ve tried many different systems on Pi3 and this is so far the fastest (lagg wise), has bluetooth out of the box and does switchover very well
BTW, thanks for the kind words about balenaSound. If you liked the current version you’ll love the next one, 3.0 is almost ready to go with some cool new features coming in
Looking forward to it very much! Altho, don’t know what you’ll add, it’s quite perfect already
(Also since you started the issue discussion - I’ve found out that with soundbars etc that have it active by deafult people are blasting their home speakers when they are at work because they forget to manually disconnect it and keep turning it up, blasting heavy rock to neighbours at weird times haha)
