Multi-room (Snapcast)

Snapcast provides perfectly synchronized audio playback across multiple rooms. odio nodes run as Snapcast clients, you need a Snapserver running elsewhere (typically a NAS).

How it works

Snapcast has two components:

Snapserver runs on your NAS or a dedicated machine. It receives audio from multiple sources (MPD, Spotify, AirPlay, PipeWire) and distributes them as synchronized streams.
Snapclient runs on each odio node. It receives a stream from the Snapserver and plays it back in perfect sync with all other clients.

The heavy work (mixing, source management) is on the server, Clients are lightweight.

On the odio node

odio ships Snapclient pre-installed as a systemctl --user service; it can be started, stopped, or monitored from the embedded UI, the application, or Home Assistant via the service controls. Discovery of the Snapserver is automatic via Zeroconf (avahi), as long as both ends share a network.

MPRIS integration (snapclientmpris)

Snapclient on its own has no MPRIS interface, so the currently playing stream is invisible to the odio UI, or any other MPRIS consumer. snapclientmpris bridges that gap: it surfaces stream metadata (title, artist, album, cover art) from the snapserver, and forwards MPRIS Play, Pause, Next, Previous, Stop to the stream’s actual source through snapserver’s Stream.Control. Pausing from one room pauses every listener on the stream, the multi-room semantic MPRIS clients expect (like Spotify Connect or AirPlay 2).

The bridge appears on D-Bus as org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.snapcast and is picked up automatically by the odio UI, Home Assistant, playerctl, GNOME’s media keys, gnome-music, and any other MPRIS client.

odio UI on the NAS: the Media Players panel shows MPD active with cover art and transport controls, and the Services panel lists snapserver.service active alongside docker, minidlna, and mpd — NAS, MPD source: MPD plays the track, snapserver picks it up and exposes the stream’s metadata.

odio UI on a Raspberry Pi client: the Media Players panel shows Snapcast client playing the same track via MPRIS with cover art, and Snapcast client service active in the Services panel — Pi client, MPD stream: snapclientmpris re-publishes the same track over MPRIS, so every room can see and pause it.

odio UI on the NAS: go-librespot is the active MPRIS player with cover art and transport controls, and the Services panel lists snapserver active alongside docker, minidlna, and mpd — NAS, go-librespot source: `mpris_enabled: true` makes go-librespot itself an MPRIS player on the NAS, and the control script feeds the same metadata into the snapserver stream.

odio UI on a Raspberry Pi client: the Media Players panel shows Snapcast client playing the same track with cover art forwarded by the meta_go-librespot.py control script — Pi client, go-librespot stream: same propagation path, this time fed by `meta_go-librespot.py`.

Pi client, librespot stream: only the track title reaches snapclientmpris, no artist or cover art (librespot’s built-in metadata path is sparser than the control-script one).

Spotify desktop app with the Connect panel open: SnapSpotHD is the selected target at the top, with SnapSpot, raspodio, and other devices listed below; the footer reads Playing on SnapSpotHD — Controller side, Spotify Connect: casting from the Spotify desktop app to `SnapSpotHD` (the `devicename=` of the librespot source).

odio UI on the controlling desktop: the Media Players panel shows Spotify with full cover art, track title, artist, album, and transport controls; the Services panel lists MPD and PipeWire PulseAudio — Controller side, odio UI: the Spotify desktop app keeps its own rich MPRIS surface alive on the host that’s casting, so the controlling node sees full metadata even when the snapclient rooms (above) only get sparse data from librespot.

Installation

odios installs snapclientmpris alongside Snapclient since 2026.5.0b3, so a fresh odio node has it ready. For manual installation on an existing node, the package ships from apt.odio.love:

sudo apt install snapclientmpris

The package depends on snapclient (apt pulls it in automatically) and ships two systemd units, one for each D-Bus bus mode below. Neither is auto-enabled.

Session bus mode (default)

The mode odios enables. The bridge runs as a systemctl --user service on the session D-Bus, where the rest of the odio stack already runs. The unit is also D-Bus session-activatable: any MPRIS client requesting org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.snapcast starts the bridge on demand, so systemctl --user enable --now is only useful to bring it up before any client asks.

System bus mode

For setups where Snapclient already runs as a system service (typically a HiFiBerry-style deployment or another integration that pre-dates the user-session approach), system bus mode runs the bridge as the _snapclient system user and owns org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.snapcast on the system bus instead. The package ships the matching D-Bus policy so any local user can still talk to it.

Switching is a config-file change (dbus-bus = system instead of session) followed by enabling the system-scope unit rather than the user-scope one; see the README for the exact commands.

On the server (Snapserver)

The Snapserver runs on your NAS, not on the odio nodes. Installing it (v0.35+ for the control-script metadata pipeline), running it as a user service, and wiring up the MPD, Spotify, and AirPlay stream sources lives in the NAS use case.

Controlling rooms

Snapcast has several control surfaces; pick whichever fits the moment:

Snapweb — web UI at http://<server>:1780 showing all clients and streams. Per-room volume, mute, stream assignment.
Snapcast app (Android) — same controls on your phone.
MPRIS clients — through snapclientmpris, the standard MPRIS surface (odio UI, Home Assistant, playerctl, gnome-music, …) shows the current stream’s metadata and lets you pause or skip from any room, pausing every listener at once.
Home Assistant — Snapcast also has its own dedicated HA integration (separate from odio’s), exposing clients and streams as native HA entities.

Each client can be assigned to a different stream: living room on Spotify, bedroom on MPD, office on AirPlay.

Desktop integration (PipeWire)

PipeWire can automatically detect Snapcast servers on your network. With the libpipewire-module-snapcast-discover module, any audio played on a desktop or laptop (browser, media player, games, system sounds) automatically appears as a Snapcast stream — zero configuration needed.

Create ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/my-snapcast-discover.conf:

context.modules = [
{   name = libpipewire-module-snapcast-discover
    args = {
        stream.rules = [
            {   matches = [
                    { snapcast.ip = "~.*" }
                ]
                actions = {
                    create-stream = {
                      node.name = "Snapcast"
                      node.description = "Snapcast Server"
                    }
                }
            }
        ]
    }
}
]

Restart PipeWire:

systemctl --user restart pipewire-pulse.service pipewire.service wireplumber.service

The Snapserver appears as “Snapcast Server” in your audio outputs. Select it, and all your desktop audio is distributed to every room.