Hello! I just got AmpliPi set up in my house, with 16 total zones. It’s working very well, but the limitation to 4 inputs is really hurting my experience.
I have a number of groups set up, like “Family Space” and “Master Suite” – but I don’t always want to use groups. My office, for example, consists of one zone named “Zach’s Office”
Here’s what I want to do – I want to be able to specify several AirPlay sources for specific groups or zones. I want to be able to walk around my house and play to one or multiple AirPlay zones simultaneously.
I could do this today if we weren’t limited to four inputs. Right now I have it set up as follows:
Input 1: Airplay source titled “Family”, playing to my “Family” group (consisting of 3 zones)
Input 2: AirPlay source titled “Patio”, playing to my Patio zone
Input 3: AirPlay source titled “Master Suite”, playing to my “Master Suite” group (consisting of 2 zones)
Input 4: AirPlay source titled “Custom”, where I specify the speakers manually in the AmpliPi.local website. This can be tedious.
Am I using AmpliPi incorrectly, or is this something on the roadmap? Thanks so much for your time.
My understanding, (and the team can correct me if I’m wrong), is that the 4 inputs is a hardware limitation with the amplifier, there is no way without a completely reworked design to have additional streams.
You might want to look at something like Home Assistant to dynamically assign Zones into Inputs based on criteria. If you actually need more than 4 different audio streams playing at the exact same time you’d have to replace the extender with another main unit unfortunately.
One thing I’ve thought of that would be cool was if multiple main units could be linked to add additional inputs, but I don’t know if that’s even remotely possible with the current design.
A combination of several preset configurations and making the AmpliPi web app a shortcut on your iphone (to make amplipi.local very close to a native app) might get this setup pretty close to what you are going for here. Realistically with 4 inputs you won’t be able to host more simultaneous airplay instances tho.
I don’t have time to write up the details right now but we will put together some preset examples soon that could make a setup like yours a lot easier to use.
I am a prospective customer with almost the exact same question, glad I found this via search.
It seems like the OP might be a little misunderstood though - not wanting to blast from tons of different airplay sources, but just use 1 to 4 individual airplay devices and have each zone or group of zones show up as airplay speakers so you wouldn’t need to go to the amplipi app.
I’m looking for a similar whole home setup for a new build - if I could have wife and kids pull out phone or iPad and just airplay their audio to “kitchen” or “kid’s room” or whatever right inside their YouTube app, and have it send to the right hardwired speaker zone(s). From reading up on the system, it seems like this would be possible, but just for one zone at a time. Do groups show up as airplay speakers as well? Just been tough to find examples with so few YouTube videos or reviews online from actual customers.
This isn’t impossible, and we’ve done some groundwork in the direction of supporting this usecase, but we’re still a ways off from having it be natively supported. Specifically, we don’t have the ability to advertise non-connected streams at the moment and can only have 4 streams connected at once (so only 4 rooms could have this functionality and nothing else could play but those four airplay sources).
At this moment, you would have to use the AmpliPi app to decide where you pipe your audio to. This may not always be the case, but I can’t provide any timetables there.
Ok I got it - so would I be able to choose up to four zones/groups to be preset as consistent airplay targets that would always be “playing” and able to be connected to? Or I always need to initiate with your app?
If you only want to use airplay, you can totally initialize the 4 airplay streams, connect them to the speakers of specific rooms, and assign each airplay stream a name that relates to what room or area of the house you’re piping that audio to and that way in airplay it would show up on the iPhones/iPads as something like “Bedroom 1”, “Bedroom 2”, “Family Room”, etc, but you’d be limited to only the four rooms unless you go into the app and move the speakers around.
If you’re happy having exactly 4 airplay speaker zones in that fashion, then you’d never have to touch our app again once you’re dialed in on the initial setup and finer settings like the decibel levels and whatnot.
Volume changes on your apple device don’t currently propagate to the AmpliPi side volume bar, but it does still change the volume of the output. Basically, you’ll have two volume bars with one acting as a multiplier on the other but you only actually need to use one of them once you find the sane default for the AmpliPi-side volume bar for your setup and usecase.
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