Multi room home music system

Hey,

I have a question regarding setting up a multi room sound system. My goal for this system is to be able to play different music in all rooms at any one time. The house have 6 “music zones” with build in speakers. My hope is to be able to control these “music zones” independently of one another. So lets say I want to listen to my favorite radio channel in the living room while my wife want to listen to her favorite Spotify playlist in the office. All speakers are routed to an AV-cabinet, is there a better way of doing this than getting 6 Raspberry Pi Zero’s and setting up six different project in the BalenaCloud. Or can one Raspberry Pi 4 do this, where on project in the BalenaCloud can be divided into zones, or in this case rooms in the house.

Thanks in advance for your guys’ help.

Hey,

balenaSound actually works the other way around - it allows combining multiple Pi’s into a single “zone”. It only supports a single audio output from a single RPi. Unfortunately having a single Pi with multiple audio outputs won’t work. It’s also impossible to subdivide a balenaCloud device into “zones” - each device in balenaCloud is its own entity. You can combine multiple devices into fleets, but not the other way around (break up a single device).
So for your project you’d need a Raspberry Pi for each “zone”.

Thinking about it some more, it might be possible to attach multiple usb DACs to a single Pi, map each one to its own container with the appropriate sound source, e.g. one container with spotify, one with web radio. However, it would take quite a bit of re-architecturing to get it to work.