How to setup snapclient output to a different sink on Vero V

Help and Support
1

Hi! I’d like to setup snapclient on my Vero V to run at the same time as Kodi. My current setup is as follows:

Vero V → TV → optical input on SoundblasterX G6 DAC/Sound card → 3.5 jack on speakers

I know it’s overkill, but I had the G6 I wasn’t using and I would have otherwise tossed it. I have been able to use both the USB sink and the line in port on the G6, when the it is powered from a separate RPI, but would prefer if I could run everything on the Vero V.

So I would like to have snapcast using the USB audio out as a sink (so I can play music while the TV is off), and keep using the line in for the TV output (which is not only from the Vero but also consoles, etc).

What would be the best approach for this? I understand Pulseaudio is not included in the standard OSMC, do I need it for this use case?

Thanks for your support!

2

I have no knowledge of snapclient and it’s a bit out of scope for this forum, but I’ll try and advise where I can.

From a quick Google, I can see that you should definitely make sure that snapclient is up to date, and you can try and enumerate all devices with snapclient --player alsa to see if your desired sinks are available.

Avoid PulseAudio if possible.

3

Let me know how it goes, as it may help others.

Cheers

Sam

4

Thanks a lot for your quick answer Sam! Always appreciate your support.

I haven’t fully set it up, but am getting infrequent sound hiccuping. At the moment I’m not sure if it’s due to having changed the soundcard to be powered from the Vero (with a USB hub) or due to not having Snapclient properly installed, so I’ll troubleshoot and let everybody know if I manage to get this working.

5

Try stop Kodi and see if it helps

6

Sorry, I meant with Kodi. I’ll test it for a couple of days since it might just be the TV tuner and I don’t want to mess around while my partner is watching TV.

7

So wanted to give an update to everyone, only just set it up but it does look like it works!

The audio skipping seems to have been solved for now by connecting it directly to the Vero instead of using the USB hub. Unsure why it it is causing issues, as the audio input was not via USB but through the optical port, but it might be due to being on different outlets than the TV. I’ll test it again after reorganizing it.

In case anybody else is interested - I installed snapclient by downloading the latest armhf bullseye version (without Pulseaudio) from the Github releases, in my case snapclient_0.30.0-1_armhf_bullseye.deb. Originally tried with arm64 but it looks like it installed a lot of arm64 packages which are already available for armhf, guessing Kodi/OSMC uses the armhf versions.

Then I just installed it via dpkg:

sudo dpkg -i snapclient_0.30.0-1_armhf_bullseye.deb

# it might give missing dependency issues, just ignore them and execute the command below

sudo apt --fix-broken install

I also installed alsa-utils just to be able to list available sound devices.

In my case I had to do a few tries to find the appropriate device/ID. I am pretty clueless when it comes to audio so I just let myself be guided by an AI, looking at the errors when executing journalctl -u snapclient -f until I found the combination of output device and sample format that worked. Finally settled on having the following line in /etc/default/snapclient:

SNAPCLIENT_OPTS="-h [Snapcast server IP] -s dmix:CARD=G6,DEV=0 --sampleformat 48000:32:*"

Restarted with sudo systemctl restart snapclient, and so far everything looks ok. Playing from Kodi/snapclient at the same time works correctly, will do some longer term testing to validate everything is ok but so far so good, and no need for Pulseaudio. Thanks for your support Sam and hopefully this helps anybody who is interested in doing the same.

1 Like
8

You’re welcome. I’m glad you got this working and I’m sure it will benefit someone else.