[Hoge974]

Hello everyone,
I am currently trying to set up a multiroom audio system using Kodi 21 on Debian Trixie along with Snapcast. I would appreciate any assistance or advice from those who have experience with similar setups.
Here are the specifics of my current setup:
I am using Debian Trixie with Kodi 21 installed.
Snapcast is intended to be the audio server for streaming to multiple rooms.
I have tried to install and configure PipeWire as the primary audio system for Kodi and Snapcast without success. I am curious to know if PulseAudio is absolutely necessary or if I can rely solely on PipeWire.
If anyone has experience with setting up a similar audio system or has insights into configurations that work well together, I would greatly appreciate your input.
Thank you in advance for your help!

[izprtxqkft]

you should find solutions to other software on their page(s) or forum(s)

like this https://github.com/badaix/snapcast/discussions/1108

[Hoge974]

Hello again,
Thank you for the suggestions so far. I wanted to provide an update and request further help as I'm still having some trouble finalizing this setup.
Current Status:
I've successfully installed and configured PipeWire on Debian Trixie as my main audio server.
I’ve created a combined_sink in PipeWire, which is recognized and working properly with pw-play and sends audio correctly to Snapcast and other outputs.
The main challenge is that Kodi does not detect combined_sink or any PipeWire-specific sinks in its audio output options. Currently, only ALSA devices are visible, which prevents me from routing audio through PipeWire as intended.
Troubleshooting Steps So Far:
I tried using advancedsettings.xml to manually configure Kodi’s audio device, but this removed all audio outputs from Kodi rather than helping it detect combined_sink.
pw-metadata has been used to set the default audio sink to combined_sink, but Kodi still doesn’t recognize it.
Questions:
Is there a way to configure Kodi to detect and utilize PipeWire sinks directly without relying on PulseAudio?
Has anyone successfully set up a similar system using PipeWire as the sole audio backend for Kodi and Snapcast?
Are there any additional configurations within Kodi or PipeWire that I might have missed, which could help expose combined_sink to Kodi?
Any further advice, especially from those who have managed a similar setup, would be highly appreciated.
Thank you again for the support!

[contremaitre]

Hello,
I have a multiroom setup. I am not using snapcast, but a DLNA server, and it works with kodi thanks to pulseaudio-dlna. Could not make it work with pipewire
The issue I am facing, and you might also face is the latency. It's fine for music, but not for movies.