Sound card output as Player

[alphasixtyfive]

It would be fantastic to have the ability to specify a local soundcard as an audio output for a player. This feature would effectively turn Music Assistant into a full-fledged open-source wired multi-room audio system.

To elaborate, I have a multi-room audio player from a company called CasaTunes, which is essentially a low-spec PC with two physical soundcards. Each output of these soundcards represents a zone (or room) and acts as an independent player. There are other companies employing the same approach while charging unreasonably high prices for it.

The idea of implementing local players would simply require the ability to specify the device and subdevice, for example:
-a hw:1,0

This enhancement would open up new possibilities for multi-room audio setups using wired connections, adding tremendous flexibility for users.

[bytewarrior]

+1! At the moment I'm running Home Assistant with a Docker Container which hosts 6 instances of MPD, which are then used in Home Assistant for Audio playback. However, MPD lacks volume normalization apart from replaygain (which does not work if you create custom playlists based on moods across artists and albums) and while it works fine with Home Assistant, HA does not show the media library at all. It's just limited to these entities and that's it.

I have a USB 7.1 sound card attached and connected to a multi-zone audio amplifier. At the moment, I cannot use Music Assistant at all, because it does not support local sound devices from what I understand (at least the doc says it doesn't).

I'm avoiding all these WIFI, cloud-based smart-speakers, because total local control and independence of cloud services is a MUST for me.