Introduction

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For a number of years now, we’ve been using our Google Home/Nest devices to stream music around the entire house. It’s good when it works, but we’ve found that the music will intermittently just stop playing for no apparent reason. This is guaranteed to happen several times a day. I’ve seen that others have reported the same problem.

We play a station from the SomaFM streaming service called “Groove Salad” pretty much all day long. It’s ambient electronic music which is a good background to day-to-day living for us. Just as you would expect, we don’t like every single song that they play, but some we like a lot, and most just fade into the background.

Google does a pretty good job of synchronizing the various devices, so if you do find yourself in a spot where you can hear two of them, it doesn’t sound like a weird echo. I’ve even created a custom command to start the music in the group that we’ved defined for the whole-house music.

That turns out to be worthwhile, because it stops so often.

Additionally, there was a time in early 2024 when our audio chromecast device stopped working for a while. It turns out that the security certificate that they set up for in on Google’s servers expired after 10 years. It took a few days for them to sort that out, but the incident showed how dependent we were on Google’s infrastructure and ongoing support for the devices we were using. It’s not like Google has never suddenly cut support for a product before, either.

I wanted some way to stream the music with the same high quality synchronization without using Google. I also didn’t want to trade Google for a lock-in on some other proprietary solution like Sonos. I was hoping to find something that was open source, and would work with a variety of hardware.

It turns out that there is a software option out there called “SnapCast” that will do exactly this.

This is a 3 Part Series

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I started out writing this as a single article, but it quickly became a monster that Jekyll said would take over half an hour to read. I found myself reluctant to break things down into more sections or to add more information because it was so long already.

I realize that breaking it up into parts doesn’t make it any shorter, but it does make it a little less daunting to read.

Let’s get started…