Each speaker/group as an Airplay selection?

Streaming Sources
1

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.

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2

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.

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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.

4

@zherbert Do you mind sharing your config? I’d like to use it to generate some example presets that can make your setup a little easier.

To download the config go to :gear: → Configuration and Reset → Download Current Configuration

5

Just DMed to you @linknum23. Thanks!

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