Multi-room Pi audio
Get your Raspberry Pi playing music around the house.
Your musical Pi can be monitored through the Balena Cloud dashboard.
© TOM’S HARDWARE
YOU’LL NEED
• Raspberry Pi 4 or Pi 400 (one unit per room)
• 8GB (or larger) microSD card, U3 cards recommended.Oneperroom
• 3.5 mm audio cables
• Amplified speakers or a receiver with 3.5mm/phono audio input
• Power supplies for your Raspberry Pis
• Optional: Smartphone or tablet
MULTI-ROOM AUDIO SYSTEMS can cost a pretty penny, but who needs to buy an expensive set of wireless speakers when you can use some Raspberry Pis and any 3.5mm wired speakers to achieve the same effect? We’ll use our Pi 4s and speakers/receivers (with 3.5mm audio inputs) to play music from a streaming service perfectly in sync via Bluetooth from our phone, tablet, or computer. We’ll show you how to do this with a single speaker and Raspberry Pi and then replicate it in other rooms. This is an excellent project for repurposing old receivers. If you have a non-Bluetooth receiver with a 3.5mm jack input, you can connect your speakers to your receiver and your receiver to your Raspberry Pi.