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by geekuillaume 2091 days ago
Shameless plug: I'm building an alternative to Sonos focused on managing audio streams on your home network. It's a software and a controller webapp to broadcast synchronized audio on any number of Windows / MacOS / Linux / Chromecast / Airplay speakers / Web pages / Philips Hue (light synchronized to the audio). It's available on https://soundsync.app/ and the sources are on Github: https://github.com/geekuillaume/soundsync
9 comments

This reminds me that I'd really love to find something that can take advantage of the implicit capability of Dolby Atmos to use a nigh-arbitrary arrangement of various speakers as a unified soundscape.
I thought only the big theater version took arbitrary speaker positions, and the home theater version used premixed channels. But now I can't remember where I read that, so I could be wrong.
My Atmos receiver required calibration of the speaker placement from multiple locations within my listening area. I'm running a 7.1.4 setup (7 surrounds, 1 subwoofer, and 4 overhead channels). I've done a lot of reading about Atmos as well; I'm fairly certain it isn't premixed channels. My ears also agree - Atmos feels incredibly immersive.
It doesn't look like that's actually the case, as Dolby's promo page for "Dolby Atmos for the home" calls out having "up to 128 simultaneous independent audio objects in a mix":

https://professional.dolby.com/tv/home/dolby-atmos/

I think most home theater systems end up mixing down to Dolby surround channels practice, of course. My receiver supports Atmos, but I still only have five speakers. :)

Could you comment on if SoundSync uses https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Sound_Control ?
OSC is oriented towards sending parameter and control information to things like synthesizers and stage lighting... sort of a fancier MIDI or DMX.

This project appears to be targeted at synchronizing and routing streaming audio inputs and outputs.

You can think of OSC as sheet music and this project as a home theater/hifi receiver.

Is it possible to support Sonos as an output as well?

My ultimate goal is to be able to use Hue Sync for Windows for Hue music beat, but play the audio through Sonos. Haven't found anything to be able to do that yet.

You can use the Airplay output integration of Soundsync to send your music to your Sonos speakers. Soundsync keep track of each output latency and correct for it to keep all output synchronized.
I like the inclusion of synchronising browser playback also, that's something beyond what snapcast offers. And it seems to be based on webRTC, is that right? Any pointers for integration with a gstreamer-based source?
Snapcast actually has synchronous browser playback. Since version 0.21 WebSocket streaming clients are supported: https://github.com/badaix/snapcast/releases/tag/v0.21.0 and is shipped with SnapWeb https://github.com/badaix/snapweb, that seems to get merged into Iris also.
Oh right, sorry! I'll look again. Thanks for your great work.
All the communication stack is based on WebRTC. I made this decision to centralize the command and audio communication methods and also to easily support web targets. For Gstreamer, it should be possible to use the same method as for the Librespot (Spotify) and Shairport (Airplay source) intergration: capturing the stdout of a program. I didn't test it yet but there is the `! filesink location=/dev/stdout` option to do just that. I might also add a way to read on a named pipe (which should be easy to do) if its needed.
Really well done and a fair license too.

Thanks for sharing!

I was wondering what I should replace our sonos with. This looks quite interesting, thank you.
Thank you, Guillaume! I added a link to Soundsync on the post.
Is it possible to use it with Apple Music?
You can use Airplay to stream to Soundsync but there is not native Apple Music integration.
Looks very good!!