For the past few weeks (months?) whenever I was flashing an SD card with Balena Etcher I would see an ad for creating a Spotify Connect server out of a Raspberry Pi. I never really thought about it until I was cleaning the garage (not for fun, I’m moving to Texas) and I wanted to play some music. I have had a standard stereo receiver with some stand up cabinet speakers for a while it just hasn’t gotten much use this year. When I had used it I would just plug my phone into a cable I had directly plugged into the receiver and I would play songs that way. Well now I have an iPhone, no more Androids, and now I don’t have a headphone jack. Great. Fuck the dongles. I now had a need for a Spotify Connect server, which honestly is what I should have done a while back. Balena has their own special way of doing things, which I kinda don’t like so I searched out a different solution.
The software I used is called Raspotify and it is really simple to get up and running. All you need is a (any) Raspberry Pi, the SD card for it, power, and a way to plug it into your stereo. Almost any Pi except a Zero are basically plug-n-play as they have a 3.5mm audio jack. Super simple. After flashing Raspbian Lite to the SD card, boot the Pi and then run one command: curl -sL https://dtcooper.github.io/raspotify/install.sh | sh
That will get you going, after the Pi is finished you should now see a Spotify Connect server named “raspotify” on your Spotify app. You can edit /etc/default/raspotify to change the defaults if you want. Like stream quality and the server name etc. I highly recommend doing this. I noticed the volume was super low by default, well the Pi had its volume set to 40%, dang. Use the command alsamixer that will let you up the volume. I tend not to use things at 100% of the volume available, most times devices start to distort at max levels. I usually stick to 90% for my volume level.
I initially got it setup and running on a Pi 3B+ and it worked just fine, except it didn’t sit well with me using a full blown Pi for such a simple task as streaming music. It just isn’t right. You could use one single Pi as a Spofity connect server as well as host many other things (Pihole etc) but I like to keep things separate. Less chance of failure for me, since I tend to not leave shit alone. Enter the Raspberry Pi Zero W. But the RPi Zero doesn’t have an audio output, ha-hah! There are a few audio DAC hats out there for the Zero that add outputs, but I don’t have one and I didn’t want to buy one or wait for it to get delivered. So we have to make one! It is actually very simple, as long as you have the parts around that is. We are going to create a pair of basic line-out outputs. Good for receivers not so good for things like headphones. Its also just a basic output no extra DAC here. If you find the audio quality isn’t up to snuff (I have not noticed a difference but I have not also tested it thoroughly or compared it to other sources, yet) then a DAC hat is for you.
