Software Control of Individual and Group Node Playback (BalenaSound)

Hi there,

This might’ve been addressed somewhere in the forum, but I’m not terrifically sure how I would word it, and searching the web hasn’t been fruitful yet, either.

The snapcast integration is great and very reliable, however I was wondering whether–much like in the case of sonos software–there’s a way to group sets of speakers on the fly. For instance, if I had pi nodes representing the patio, living room, and bedroom, respectively, could I group the patio and living room together in synced playback and avoid playback in the bedroom, then group them all back together without re-writing configs in the balena cloud?

Hi @Negimaki ,

Welcome to the forums!

What you are asking can be done, with some (maybe a lot of!) hacking - the various components of balenaSound can be made to do it. However the project has not gotten to a point where it is possible by default. Having multiple groups of servers and playback devices requires launching multiple snapcast servers and some other technical details that are not currently available in balenaSound. There may also be hardware limitations as well, since each process eats up compute resources. As it stands, the sound-supervisor in balenaSound assumes everything is one big group, and it assigns the “current server” IP address to all clients.

Cheers!