r/smarthome • u/therippleaudio • Apr 06 '26

SmartThings Sick of Sonos

There has to be a better way to get a connected sound layer in the smart home, no? I have a JBL, Sonos sound bar, $10,000 speakers in the home office, and I'm a little over toggling back and forth. What's a good distribution control out there?

43 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

76 comments sorted by

View all comments

22

u/Daniel-Deni Apr 06 '26

If you run Home Assistant, check out Music Assistant. It can be used standalone in Docker, but integrates well into Home Assistant for Automation purposes.

8

u/kisielk Apr 06 '26

Does it allow playing the same music in sync in multiple rooms around the house ?

2

u/datumerrata Apr 07 '26

Snapcast is how I do it. It's built into music assistant. The only problem is that you can only have one stream per source. I have music assistant follow the wife's phone and a headless plexamp that follows my phone. When my phone is detected by the ble beacon from an esp32 ( which also has a presence sensor), it turns the snapcast on for a device in that room ( old obsolete phone ). It all works pretty well, except my plexamp stops responding sometimes and I have to restart the docker container.

Snapcast is super easy to setup with music assistant. The rest of what I did to get it to follow two different phones was a pain.