Now that I have the lights voice-activated, the next thing I go back to is whole house audio. Currently, I have 5 zones to that I can send audio. I have at least 3 and up to 5 more zones I want to put into the house for music. From a computer I can use iTunes and Airplay music out to all zones at once. I also can use the Remote App on the iPhone to control the remote iTunes instance. So in this scenario, I have some control over the whole house audio. While I do have a massive iTunes library, what if I wanted to use something else? What if I wanted to play the music that was directly on my phone?
That’s the complication. IOS devices can Airplay out, but only to one remote zone at a time. So if you wanted to use whole-house audio at my location, you are stuck with using iTunes. It can be a bit limiting sometimes. What I want is something I will refer to as an amplification proxy. The iPhone (or iTunes) could connect to this single zone. Once it was connected to this single receiver – it could then take the single stream and turn it into three, four, or ten streams (depending on how many zones you have). However, there doesn’t seem to be a product out there.
There are ways to trick Airplay to work across subnets since it was originally designed to be local subnets only. I thought this would be my ticket to getting this done, but this software doesn’t seem to have any method to turn a single stream into multiple. There is another piece of software called Airfoil that is paid software. It allows you to take the audio output of any Mac or Windows program and send it to Airplay speakers. Then they have a separate piece of software that turns the system into a receiver and then pumps it out to the main software all over again. I may actually turn to this, but my problem is that I have to get two pieces of software to work in a wonky scenario.
Ultimately I would love a solution that I could run on a Raspberry Pi. It would give me an excuse to buy a new one. I would rather use a homebrew solution and spend the money on hardware than buy a piece of software. Everything I have heard about Airfoil sounds great, but it would be better if a single software package could handle both sides of the equation.
So my question to you Internet community – do you know of a write-up that covers how to do this easily? I know someone else will find this post through Google and see that I also don’t have an answer, but maybe they will be closer than I am. I’m also hoping my fellow geeks on Twitter or Facebook will see this and it will remind them of something and they can point me in the right direction.
Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
