[PLUG] Open Source Whole House Audio Streaming Alternatives to Sonos, Chromecast

[John Karr <brainbuz@brainbuz.org>]

A friend of mine recently turned me on to ChromeCast Audio for creating 
a whole hose audio streaming system, at about 3% what the very 
proprietary and restrictive Sonos system would cost to do the same. Now 
that my appetite is whetted, ChromeCast Audio has a lot of shortcomings:

 * poor quality integrated DAC
 * only supports wireless connection and has frequent dropouts
 * undocumented API (based on DLNA protocol)
 * need Google's Home Application on Andriod to manage them
 * linux driver (pulse-dlna) has audible click switching tracks during 
playback from VLC (and Clementine my preferred player doesn't seem to 
want to send audio there at all).

There are a number of premium sound cards available for raspberry pi 
along with the ability to connect a higher quality dac via usb or 
optical out add ons. I've found a number of different programs out there 
that might be usable to create a better system to upgrade from ChromeCast.

The question is has anyone used Raspberry Pi or similar devices to 
create a whole house audio network? What software (preferably FOSS) and 
hardware did you use?

To clearly state the problem I'm trying to solve: I have 3 stereos 
around my house and I want to be able to transmit audio without lag to 
all of my speakers at once. My house is already wired with ethernet in 
every room. I have a huge local digital music library which I want to play.

I prefer an ethernet based solution to running a lot of new wires to 
create a system that cannot easily be reconfigured (if I wanted to movie 
the master player or add more amplifiers and speakers)



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