building a better sonos with free software and cheap hardware
When I first heard about Sonos I was impressed. Completely synchronized music playing in every room is something I’ve always wanted, but the price seemed ridiculous, especially if you like the speakers you already own. Most of their products have a speaker integrated into them, forcing you to ditch any Hi-Fi equipment you might already own. Also I like keeping my own library of digital music and Sonos steers users towards using streaming services.1
For a while I was convinced there wasn’t a good open-source solution that could
rival Sonos, but then I started playing with forked-daapd. It’s like
iTunes but better. It scans your music library and allows you to
stream it to Airplay receivers around the house. It also accepts audio via
pipe so you can hook it up to receive audio from other sources and
send it to your speakers.
