Controling Multiroom Audio with Chromecast / Spotify

Apps & Services 3rd Party
1

Hello everyone,
i’ve set up an raspberry pi with openHAB 2.0 and so far I like the amount of features I can setup.What I haven’t archieved so far is to setup my multiroom audio.

Currently I have some chromecast devices that I feed music from spotify and I can control it with my android phone. The ideal situation would be to control the destination (kitchen, whole house, living room) for spotify with openhab and also read the track and play/pause/next from spotify.

As far as I understood that is not directly possible with bindings so far. But how about some alternative solutions?

My first idea was to setup an emulated spotify client on the rapsberry and control it via mouse movement commands. But that only seems possible via an emulator that I need to pay for or it’s not really easy to setup.

Second idea was to set up a media server that can connect to spotify (e.g. mopidy) and use the chromecast as an output sink. But thats not super easy to install.I’m still working on that.

Does anyone here have a similar thing set up? Any Tips?

If it’s really not possible to do I can also imagine to switch to another multiroom system but I like the chromecast setup and would like to make it work.

2

Hi again,
is there noone who can help me here? Or at least discuss that issue or report from their experiences?

3

I am using happily logitechmediaserver (squeezebox) on 6 players, runs very stable does full synch mode or individual players, links to all services I like (spotify, somaFM, JazzRadio, etc), if you want to consider this as an alternative.

4

Hi Markus,
what do I need as the "receiver " in each room then? a pi or some sort of pc or is there something smaller available?

Thanks for sharing this.

5

You will need a player, and amp and speakers. In my case these are rpi’s, a variety of DAC’s (the built in audio in the rpi does not give joy), some small class-D amps and an assortment of shelf speakers. SqueezeLite is a great player for me.
After some manual installations, I grew rather fond of the offerings from MAX2PLAY especially their feature to prevent any writes on the SD-card. That allows my SD cards to happily live a long time and i do not have to setup up new players regularly just because the SD card gave up.
Hope that helps

6

Hi @daberne & other participants

I don’t have experience with it, but a few weeks ago I found https://github.com/balloob/pychromecast which connect Raspberry Pi to Chromecast by Python. Maybe you can use it? Please let know if it will work out.

Best,
Jurjen