I’m very busy planning my ideas for my new house. One of the main things I want to achieve is music throughout the house. I really think this brings a very nice atmosphere.
But to do this I believe it’s important to manage on a room-by-room basis. Meaning I would like to have controllers like tablets, panels, google hubs, or whatever in the important areas in the house to manage this. To run specific music it’s ok to do this via Spotify or an app. but some base playlists and general audio level need to be controllable.
For what I’ve been playing with Homey i only seems possible with flows and just partially. its not easy to say play spotify playlist X on all speakers. and see what is playing on what volume in a dashboard or so.
Do I need to run to home assistant for this do you think?
What speakers do you use. I don’t think home assistant solves your problem. You have to determine what you want. I myself dislike tablets and controllers. I want music in my house just working.
I use Sonos in every room. In the livingroom it will group the kichen, livingroom and playbar. Switching on TV with Logitech Harmony will mute the kitchen and will set the music louder. Turning off will regroup and will turn the music softer. I use some flows for this.
Music will automatically turn on when the first person enters the livingroom. Music also will turn on when I arrive at home(iOS telephone and Locative app.
When i cook in the Kichen music will automatically play louder when the hood turn on(smart plug)
In the living room i have a 8 button switch. 1 button is for play or off and two buttons for music louder or softer and same buttons for playlists to skip forward or backwards a number.
I run a homeyscript every two weeks to determine which radiostation and playlists will play for 14 days. I my script i use 3 playlists and 11 radiostations(some stations i use double). So every day another station or playlist.
For controlling Sonos i use my NAS with a sonos api. That way i can use my flows a little better than with the Sonos app from Homey. Music louder or softer does work much better that way, switching Sonos playbar to TV also works better.
Installed 2 Sonos One speakers last weekend. 1 in living room and 1 in bedroom. You can group the speakers. I use the bedroom speaker also as alarm clock. Can’t wait for the release of the Sonos Roam (for the bathroom). I use the music from my NAS (600 ripped cd’s).
Very satisfied with the possibilities so far.
I had a bunch of standalone speakers left over and some chromcast audio devices from the time before SONOS became good. Since those still work more than well up to date, I did not bother to try another ecosystem.
So I have chromecast powered speakers in almost every room and for the livingroom also a chromecast hooked up to the Bose HT System.
Now my music playlists always casts to the whole chromecast speaker group. The speakers in other rooms turn on and off depending on the Zone activity, using Fibaro wallplugs.
My playback controls and playlist selection works mostly with flic buttons.
Also using this setup in the bedroom as alarm, by gradually turning up the volume over time along my artificial sunrise. It would only turn off if I open the bedroom door. Gotta cheat myself to get up
The playlists are automatically created by my plex media server and played back in random order to the speaker group.
The whole setup is controlled by Homey only. Well, except for the media server which is hosted on my NAS of course.
