Speaker thing

Hi, i’m looking for speaker for my home automation. I want something who can play same or different music or in every room. I want to be able to send my iPhone music on it and my server need to be able to use it to speak notification (it can be bluetooth)

I know sonos is good but i’m looking for something cheaper

You might look into Google’s Chromecast Audio. They recently added the ability to stream the same audio to multiple receivers at the same time. With that an a relatively cheap stand alone speaker with an AUX in you should be able to do what you are looking for.

It is currently pretty much impossible to connect to and send audio to multiple Bluetooth speakers at the same time. The Bluetooth spec just won’t support it.

You could equip your server with multiple bluetooth USB dongles and/or USB sound cards. But be warned it can be a hassle to set up. For spoken notifications (recorded or TTS), I’m using my server’s (a Pi) sound jack.

I think i need something like a hub … and the hub can send to specific speaker but … how could it work … i mean how to hub will know on witch speaker i want to send music ???

Well, your server is the hub, and you address your rooms(speakers) by selecting the corresponding linux output device.

Ok so i need a raspberry for each speaker … my server (hub) is a mac and my phones iPhone… i suppose i need to setup an airplay server on each raspberry pie ( or just buy an airport express) ? could do it ?

Did you try squeezeplug, aka squeezebox server (aka Logitechmediaserver). It has been ported to raspberry and other ARM boards and is now available through Max2Play, although you may find other versions still out there. For years I am running a system with now 6 players (over WiFi and wired), all synched or individual depending on the use case, linked to my NAS, I had for a few years a raspberry (both model B and 2) as a server and it is running pretty stable (although internet outage can upset the system to the point of the need of a restart). Now my NAS (Asustor) is the squeezeplug server and things work better. OpenHab has a binding for it too. The best and cheapest multiroom audio that I can find. And the Max2Play implementation supports airplay too.

Of course there’s many (some more, some less complex) ways that all lead to Rome.
With my proposal, you would use a single server (your mac - or move openhab to a Raspberry). Then you just need multiple bluetooth-enabled speakers.

Have you actually set up multiple Bluetooth dongles on a single machine and tried to send audio over more than one at a time? I tried it once a year or so ago and found that the audio quality dropped a whole lot when I tried to send audio over two at the same time. There was also a little bit of an echo as one speaker was a fraction of a second behind the other.

I’d be very interested to hear if someone has successfully done this, what BT dongles were used, what libraries, etc.

I built something like this a few month ago. I documented it all here.
For me, it works great. But i am still using this with a single speaker only, so @rlkoshak s argument might be valid. But if anyone wants to try it, the information is there.