Feature: subsonic support

[zombiehoffa]

Would be nice if this could take subsonic as an audio source, as that would allow it to work with a ton of opensource backend servers (airsonic, navidrome, etc).

[linknum23]

We would love find a way to support Subsonic and its derivatives. At the moment I am unsure about whether or not it is possible, below is an idea of how it could work.

Simple Idea - Remote playback using subsonic app

Setup

• Configure your subsonic audio server to generate one or more network audio streams (URLs) that can be played by VLC
• Setup one or more of AmpliPi's internetradio streams, one per URL (they really play more than internet radio streams)

Playback

• Select the songs to play using a subsonic client and have them play to one of the configured network streams
• Set one of the sources on AmpliPi to play that network stream
• Enjoy the audio

Further investigation

It looks like a basic subsonic server is just an audio file server and database, but some of the implementations are able to connect to and control other audio devices, like Sonos speakers. At first glance I was not able to see from the documentation on Navidrome (one of the more popular subsonic alternatives) how to configure an audio stream output. It looks like it may be made possible by Jukebox mode https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome/issues/364 which has not been implemented yet.

What specific subsonic server are you looking to support?

[zombiehoffa]

I don't really need you guys to support playback from navidrome as much as I need you to be able to be a subsonic client for the purpose of selecting music to play over what subset of speakers, which is how it works on my current sinks system.

[linknum23]

Our web app does not have any sort of song selection/playlist capability right now. Adding a song selection interface would be a significant design effort both on the API side and the UI side. It is something that we are considering implementing in the future.

At the moment AmpliPi uses streaming services that either generate the songs themselves, like Pandora or have an app with remote contro/song selection such as Spotify Connect.

[zombiehoffa]

There's a few years until I build my next house and would seriously be in the market for several thousand dollars of equipment so hopefully things progress and your project gets built out in that time, as I would very seriously consider it if it gets a bit more built up.