A hands-on account of building a DIY multi-room audio system using Snapcast on Raspberry Pis as an alternative to spending $1000+ on Sonos hardware. Snapcast acts as a music distribution layer, streaming audio with embedded timestamps to multiple Snapclient devices for synchronized playback across rooms. The setup uses a Pi 4 as the Snapserver connected via Ethernet, with older Pi models (including Pi Zero 2 W) running Snapclient over Wi-Fi. USB DAC adapters or HiFiBerry HATs improve audio quality cheaply. The tradeoff is manual configuration via SSH and config file editing instead of a polished app, but the result is hardware you own with no vendor lock-in, plus optional AirPlay (Shairport Sync) and Spotify Connect (Raspotify) integration.
