Music zones

Introduction

A music zone is an audio player installed in a room, which Calaos drives like the rest of the house: starting a playlist, setting the volume, skipping to the next track, stopping everything when you leave.

Each equipped room becomes an independent zone, with its own playback and its own volume.

Supported systems

SystemDescription
SqueezeboxLogitech Squeezebox players and compatibles, driven by a Lyrion / Logitech Media Server
RoonPlayers managed by a Roon server

In both cases Calaos does not play the music itself: it controls the playback system already in place, and gets back the playback state and information about the current track.

What Calaos displays

Once the zone is declared, the interfaces present a complete player: current track, album art, playback and volume controls, access to playlists, artists, albums and radios.

This library comes from the music server, not from Calaos: the tracks you see are the ones it knows about.

Prerequisites

The music server must be installed and working, with its players already declared and audible. Calaos sits on top of a working installation, it does not replace it.

Before anything else, check that you can start a track in a room from the system’s native interface. If you cannot, the problem is upstream of Calaos.

Give the music server a fixed IP address, as well as the players. This is the most frequent cause of zones disappearing after a power cut.

Adding a zone

In Calaos Installer, Add → Music zone, then state the system and the player concerned.

Calaos Installer can detect Squeezebox players present on the network, which saves entering addresses by hand.

Using it in rules

A music zone is used like any IO:

  • stop the music everywhere in the “Leaving” scenario;
  • start a playlist at wake-up time, with a schedule;
  • lower the volume when the doorbell rings;
  • stop playback in a room when it empties, from a presence detector.

See Create rules, Scenario and Time scheduling.

Diagnosis

If a zone does not answer:

  1. does the player work from the music system’s native interface?
  2. is the music server reachable from the Calaos server?
  3. have the addresses changed since it was configured?
  4. is the player switched on? Some players shut down completely and stop answering.

See Logs.

See also

To drive a home cinema receiver rather than a multi-room player, see Audio/Video Receivers.