balenaSound is awesome

General
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I just wanted to drop some kudos to the team for creating balenaSound. I have been looking for YEARS for a suitable solution for setting up multi-room audio without buying a bunch of amps and running miles of speaker wires through my house. (Or going broke buying Sonos, just so I can throw it all away when they stop supporting it.)

It took me a grand total of 45 minutes to setup balenaSound on 4 Raspberry Pis and connect them throughout my house to boom-boxes and our main stereo. I didn’t even have to buy anything because I already had the RPis and aux cables on hand. Before dinner time, I had the entire house filled with music!

@tmigone, great work, man! And same to whoever else works on this project.

I am thinking of trying my hand at contributing to the project. I’ve never done any open source contributions before, despite having been in the IT field for more than 20 years. So this will be a fun and interesting challenge. I’ve been trying to engage with the forums and issue tracking to get more familiar with the project. Hopefully that has been a positive overall. :wink: And I’ve been reviewing the code when I have time to block out the world for a few minutes at a time.

Thank you for a great solution!

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Hey Mark, thanks for your kind words! I feel you on the Sonos pricetag :laughing:, I think that and the ability to modify the project to your liking are big reasons for balenaSound’s success.

Just want to share the love with @chrisys and @AlexProgrammerDE who are also responsible for this great project! Community contributions are a definitely a big part of balenaSound (case in point: Alex’s many contributions!). For our recent v3.0 release I’ve added a bunch of documentation covering how the internals of the project work with the hopes of attracting more contributors and making it easier to contribute! Right now (as you’ve already experienced based on our GH interactions :roll_eyes:) things are a bit messier than usual with a few issues with our docs product of the recent release, but we are working on fixing all that.

Anyways, happy to get this kind of feedback and glad you are liking it. Feel free to drop by here or at GitHub if you have questions or suggestions!
Happy hacking! :sound::sound:

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Also, in case you hadn’t made the connection already, I am ChestersGarage on Github. I tried changing my balena account name to that, but it’s not changeable as far as I have found so far.

@chrisys, @AlexProgrammerDE, props to you as well!

I expect to use balenaSound for the foreseeable future, and will be upgrading to high-end DACs and other components soon.

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@koyaanisqatsi thanks for taking the time to make this post, it’s great to hear. This is why we love what we do! Looking forward to seeing lots of cool new features coming from your direction :smiley:

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