Instead of quoting Charles Haltrey and the deaf-aids, I suppose the “house” referenece should have gone to Hugh Laurie, but not as musical, or maybe I should have just said “inst, inst, inst”. Any way on to the action.
I’ve been using O!MPD on a Raspbery Pi for my music server. I like it, but I want more. I want to have synchronized whole house audio. O!MPD can forward the playlist to other instances of MPD, but they freewheel and don’t necessarily stay in sync.
In comes SnapCast to rescue me. It can synchronize audio playback, and it uses MPD! Hooray!. Almost.
My first issue was ‘casting from one pi to another, noise, weird modulation, icky, but the music was there in the chaos. Turned to be a known issue with Raspberry Pis. There was noise in the power to the USB audio device. Powered up solved that.
Second issue, now the music is playing fine to the 2nd pi, but it isn’t in sync with the first. O!MPD was playing to MPD, which was sending traffic to the snapcast fifo and directly to the audio device. I removed the audio device from mpd.conf and started snapclient. No audio at all to the main R-Pi. That is where it stands. I did see and error writing to device message from snapclient when I ran it in the foreground. I checked permissions and I can play a .wav file using aplay when I am su’d to the snapclient user. hmm… I’ll let you know.
**Edit – so I was using the wrong sound card index. changed -s 1 to -s 2 and voila!