Airplay/Spotify UX/Timeout

Streaming Sources
1

Trying to think through how to replicate a Sonos-esque UX with my Amplipi. The user behavior I’m trying to support is:

  • User walks into room
  • User pulls out phone, start audio source of choice from phone (pandora/podcast/spotify/itunes/etc.)
  • User then casts (either Airplay or Spotify) to the speaker zone for that room
  • If they want to add zones/speakers as they move through the house, they can go to amplipi.local

The challenge comes in step 3. Its easy enough to create ‘streams’ for each zone/stream combination (e.g. Family Room Spotify, Family Room Airplay), but if a stream isn’t actively assigned to an input, then it doesn’t seem to be broadcast as an option.

This is logical in some respects, you don’t want to stream to a non-input. However, it creates very clunky UX without this behavior. A user wanting to walk into a room and play whatever they’re listening to on their phone would have two app they need to go to (amplipi to assign the stream and zone and then their music source to broadcast to the assigned stream).

What I’m wondering is:

  1. Is it possible to keep a stream (Airplay or Spotify only) unassigned to an input ‘active’ so that it is selectable from a users phone?
  2. Recognizing this can create orphaned streams, can you then detect which stream is actively being used, and assign that automatically to a non-active input?

I suspect I’d need to create a little app to maintain valid config for the Amplipi for #2 to support the myriad of corner cases that can arise from this behavior, but I’m hoping #1 is a possibility. I’d love other suggestions as well if I’m missing a different/better approach to this. Happy to log it as a feature request as well if there’s interest… TIA!

2

We are definitely planning on adding support for both 1 and 2 in the future but we need to add an additional layer of buffering to support this type of dynamic switching. It is the focus of this issue on GitHub: https://github.com/micro-nova/AmpliPi/issues/262

At the moment exactly how we are going to do this has not been fleshed out so the issue doesn’t have much detail.

3

That’s great to hear, thanks so much for the quick reply. If there’s anything that can be done to help escalate or contribute, please let me know (very helpful feature for the Wife Approval Factor)

4

Good to hear. At the very least we will keep this in mind when we start testing this all out so we can get some early feedback.