In my first attempt, I invested quite some time into transporting local sources (line in, bluetooth) from a satellite node to the central snapserver using icecast. It worked, but was quite unhandy to work with and I almost never used it. As the ansible implementation supports a snpaserver on more than one node and each client running as many snapclients as there are snapservers in the network, I can use snapcast for all audio network transport use cases and don't need icecast any more.
But what I use quite often is to connect to a satellite with bluetooth and playing the sound directly there (i.e. only on that node without transporting it to the snapserver). So I currently use a local shortcut that sends the bluetooth (and/or line in) audio directly to the local ALSA sink.
Line In can get connected
- on all nodes: to the hifiberry
dmixdevice where it is output directly to the local speakers and cannot be distributed further - on a
snapservernode: to the alsa loopback device where it is picked up (and distributed) from snapserver
Most tricky part:
- Needs automatic pairing
- bluetooth stack is open for surprises: on updates, bad bluetooth implementations stack on (mobile) clients
bluealsaworks perfectly, but you need to know the MAC-Adress of the bluetooth device to address the ALSA port