piersjones / sonos-vinyl

forked to use different port

Vinyl on Sonos

This project was born as I started only to listen to streamin music services once I my Sonos system. But I also have a collection of vinyl that I didn't wanted to throw away and keeping the whole old setup was kind of overkill. Unfortunately there isn't such a great offering from Sonos to enable vinyl players as source in the network is rather limited and expensive at the same time the idea was born to reuse a raspi and a USB Audio device to solve this issue.

In my first try I was using a Raspberry Pi Zero W and a Behringer UFO202 which did work but also had it caveats as the CPU was dramatically overwhelmed with MP3 encoding. So in the meantime I upgraded to a Raspberry Pi 3b+ and also swapped the Behringer device with a proper high quality Phono PreAmp – the rega Fono Mini A2D mk2.

Additionally with this switch I wanted to optimize the setup and also switch to a docker based setup. tl;dr: this actually works like a charm now but also has a couple of problems:

• ~~ the container is rather huge as I based it on the balenalib/raspberry-pi3-debian:buster-run image ~~ now the container is even bigger but in exchange build in a true multiarch way
• it runs 2 processes in the same container as icecast2 is started as a service UPDATE: although not really clean this is a benefit given that the container is based on debian:11-slim as no additional linkage or networking needs to be established
• there is very likely a ton of things brought in with the debian package of liquidsoap than actually needed
• default passes haven't been changed yet – look at the Dockerfile it is way too simple to sort these things out
• the input and encoding are hardcoded in the liquidsoap call starting the process to the first subsystem of the first input

running the service

Starting this thing is actually as easy as calling:

$ docker run --name sonos_vinyl --rm -d -p 7000:7000 --device /dev/snd docker.io/deichten/sonos-vinyl:latest

Where the name is absolutely optional and I only added for readability. Afterwards you might open http://<your-raspi-docker-host-address>:8000/ in your browser and start streaming the audio input.

Pro Tip

As this repo is setup to build a new container version via github actions I also run containrrr/watchtower to keep the version always up to date on my Raspi.