I'll look closer into this when I'm back at the computer in about an hour. In the post on the KDE forum, they seem to get an error complaining about the version though, while in my case they don't show up at all when I attempt to pair. I've checked the things listed on the KDE Connect wiki, but those checks pass.

EDIT: UDP discovery was turned off on my phone, and turning it on allowed connection. All is good now!

Never heard that song. For me, the most famous number would be 32 16 8.

It happens in my home office, my living room and my actual office. So where I spend 95% of my time with them. So if that were the case, I'd be very disappointed.

As for comfort - I find they are too tight and my head will start hurt (on top) after some time. Loosening them alleviates this somewhat, but they will drag more down on my ears which I find uncomfortable.

Tested with four different machines, one running Linux, two using Windows 10 and one with macOS. Seems to be a codec issue where Linux and Windows defaulted to SBC and macOS to AAC (where it did not occur). Changing to LDAC on Linux helped, although I am certain I had issues with this before with that codec. On Win10 I have no wiggle room as it is my work machine, and I seem to need third party software installed to change.

Hm, the Music Assistant at least does not quite accomplish what I hope and it seems to rely on services such as Spotify or YT Music to be integrated. I couldn't quite evaluate the LinkPlay-solution, but his comment on SD card corruption with RPis made me a bit worried for the balenaSound approach. I guess there's a lot of write operations in such a setup, that can easily corrupt the SD cards. I wonder how often they kept failing for him - maybe it'll end up being some sort of a "subscription fee" 😅

My wife says no more toys at the moment, but if I were to implement this, I’d probably pick up one of those Up2Streams for each room and try out the LinkPlay integration.

Then you have something to put on your list for Christmas, if that is something you celebrate :)

Nice. I don't have much experience with VMs yet. Is USB pass-through easily configured?

The Acrylic device also seems pretty nice - I'll dig a little deeper on that one as well. The rabbit hole becomes ever deeper.... :)

Hehe, and for that I apologize! In case you are interested, here are the options I am so far considering. Still very much in the research phase, trying to figure out my specs before I buy any gear I don't already have. I am not very experienced with this, so feel free to point out any baloney in the below text. Anything that could spare me time researching dead ends is gratefully received.

Option 1: Snapcast

Since I will be running a Raspberry Pi 4 with Home Assistant anyway (not yet set up properly), I would like to make use of the Snapcast integration in HA to run the Snapcast server and then set up a Raspberry Pi Zero W (with some 3.5mm extension) with all speakers I want to connect. Ideally these Zeros could be powered by the speaker themselves (through USB for example) to avoid two plugs, but I don't know how realistic it is to achieve this, and I have not done much research into this yet.

The issue that I so far have is that I don't know how I can stream audio from my Android device to the Snapcast server. From my understanding, and what I hoped to clarify with this thread, is that it requires a specific audio source that the Snapcast can recieve audio from. Here is a list. This seems to my limited experience much more doable from my laptop running Linux than from my Android device. But I don't know...

Currently I will be investigating whether I can use audio streaming in scrcpy to stream audio to the Pi, and then route that via PulseAudio to Snapcast. I don't know yet if this is a really cool idea or an incredibly stupid idea. I want to setup scrcpy for another purpose anyway, so why not try? :) It might introduce additional latency from my device to the speakers, but as this happens before the "distribution" from the server to the clients, I don't think this would affect the synchronization. Also, I will never use this to speak on the phone with anyone, so that there is some latency doesn't really matter to me. The biggest issue would be toggling this off and on - maybe via a remote command with KDE Connect or something like that. If I could set that up as a custom tile in the quick access menu in Android, that might work.

All in all it seems a bit too convoluted though, so I don't have too much faith in this.

Option 2: balenaSound

So this is the solution I first learned about as an alternative to Sonos, but I was turned off by the need to connect my devices via the internet to the balenaCloud hosted by the developers. However, either I missed this in the first round of research, or they have released it since, but OpenBalena exists which has much of the functionality of balenaCloud (but not all) and can be self-hosted. If I could get the server to run on my Raspberry Pi 4, and then flash balenaOS onto each Pi Zero W, this could provide what I want as I understand that it allows to stream audio directly to the Zero Ws via Bluetooth (with subsequent sync to the OpenBalena server via WiFi). It would be a much simpler solution than the one above, especially in terms of toggling it on and off on my Android device.

A downside to this solution though, is that I believe I would not be able to install it on a Pi running Home Assistant OS (correct me if I am wrong), and that running HA through Docker makes installing new integrations a bit more cumbersome? Maybe that will pose no problem, as I don't plan on using too many integrations anyway (Zigbee, Netatmo and a MQTT broker). I could perhaps also run a VM that runs Home Assistant OS?

Ok, thanks. I don't want to name (and shame) them before they've had a chance to provide other options, and I've been happy with the support from them before. But I know it doesn't help you help me. I'm pretty sure it is not integrated based on the way they describe it. I could try to open it later and see if I can identify it. A decade of Macbooks, and the prospects of opening a laptop seems scary somehow, even though I'm an engineer and have regularly opened up much more expensive equipment in my work.... though not computer related.

That is unfortunately not available in the Linux client.

Thanks - those were both enabled, and I've disabled them now. However, this still happens after I've done this and restarted the client. I also tried turning off peer exchange that I found together with these options under the Privacy tab, also without solving the issue.

I recently started organizing my music to use with Jellyfin and/or Navidrome. Since Jellyfin requires a particular folder structure, I used this, and I've also used MusicBrainz Picard to tag all my music so that it works better with Navidrome. I ended up just using Jellyfin as it suited my needs perfectly, and using it with a desktop client on my laptop (Feishin) and mobile client on my phone (Finamp).

The way Jellyfin requires it to be organised is the way I would've done it myself anyway:

Artist 1
|-- Album 1
||----Disc 1
||----Disc 2
|--Album 2
Artist 2
|-- Album 1
etc ...

In my experience, if you try to organize based on genres, you need to have a very defined sense of what genres everything you have is. Either you stick with very broad genres (Rock, Jazz etc.) or you get tons of subgenres that you quickly lose control over if you don't know exactly what is what. Since the clients I use have the possibility to sort by genre, I am planning on giving it an overhaul at some point, but then I will use very broad genres.

I also got 9/20, feeling certain about only a handful, and completely thrown off by others. Since all questions were yes/no, expected score would be 10/20, so my score correctly reflects that I had no real idea what was AI-generated or not. I expect the average score to be close to 10/20, skewed somewhat higher by those who might have a keen eye for some telltale signs of AI-trickery.