Sonos and a private ice cast to stream your own collection

  • 27 November 2020
  • 5 replies
  • 1378 views

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We all know of the 65k limit of MP3’s that Sonos can handle.

We also might now of Spotify playing the same songs over and over again for your daily mix…

I now have a raspberry pi and mounted my music collection

I just had a brainf*t that maybe I could run a docker with icecast and dark ice: https://github.com/jwater7/docker-darkice

 

And generate ‘radio stations’ to play may music. 

I searched only a little but could not find anything related quickly

pre-requisite: I have my music organzied in genre/artist/album

I am playing around with nodejs and have build an interface to interact with the collection (the main idea was to move music out of my collection to reach the Sonos limit.

I am thinking that it would be nice to

  1. create playlists on a scheduled basis (nightly) to have a fresh playlist in the morning
  2. keep track of tracks that have been played
  3. add albums to custom playlists (for today I want to listen to these albums)
  4. create ‘radiostations’ for different genres of music (combine bluegrass, country alt country) or albums that can be selected (I have a liking for obscure femaie vocal artists from the 50’ies

Has anybody done this before?

Looking for tips in the area of creating playlists so they turn into radiostations that can be accessed in the sonos app, checking logs of icecast/darkice of tracks actually played (so they don’t show up in the play list again the following day).

Programmatically I think I can handle it but I would be nice if I get a headstart with the casting part.

If this is workable I will definitely share the code. I had a php version of something similar that would play the music through VNC on an old laptop connected to my 5.1 set.

Any input (or ideas) welcome.

Kind Regards,

Gerrit Kuilder

 

 

 

 


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5 replies

Userlevel 5
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Hi @Gerrit Kuilder, welcome to the Sonos community. Thank you for sharing this with us. Using a 3rd party software is not supported, it may or may not work with Sonos. Of course, we don’t limit you from using it or exploring what you prefer, just keep in mind Sonos's Policies. We can wait for inputs and suggestions from our community users. If you need help with any other information, please be sure to let us know.

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Hi @Gerrit Kuilder ,

I’m on a simmilar journey. My girlfriend and I got weak and bought a bunch of IKEA Symphonisk and are happy with the Internet Radio weakup funktion and multi-room-ish audio as well. 

But now I try to wire up an CD Player and a turntable (we are kinda haptic about our music) and have some decent 5.1 sound for movies -- not that centerspeaker + rear + sub (3.1ish) Sonos advertises as 5.1 “solution”.

Currently, I try to save my investment and research possibilities with either web-radio station or UPnP/DLNA ways to stream with low latency. But maybe that tips over and I switch back to hifiberry boards.

Best regards,

   Michael 

Userlevel 7
Badge +20

@Gerrit Kuilder : You could also look at running Plex on your Pi. There is good integration of Plex as a Sonos music service, and it runs well on Pi hardware. There are some details in the thread at:

 

Hello I join the party.

I just assembled a pi4+hifiberry adc+dac .

Icecast2 → http://streamy.local/internalstream.mp3 → tunein extra radiostation on sonos 

 

Not working yet. Test stream using ices2 is ogg . Not supported.

Q: is an internal url supported or does it have to be internet reachable ? 
 

 

If you’re going the Pi route, it’s fairly simple to add an LMS server, with the UPnP plugin, then use your Sonos speakers as UPnP renderers. I actually prefer the Material Skin to the Sonos app. It runs in any browser, so works perfectly on my Chromebox, which Sonos continues to ignore. Also, with a Pi Zero and a small touchscreen, a nice desktop controller can easily be built.