Raspberry Pi: Multiple independent audio channels

I want to feed a multi-zone home audio system from a Raspberry Pi.

One channel should be easy, but I want multiple people in the house to be able to listen to their own music simultaneously.

I know there’s some work ahead of me to get Mopidy to manage several streams at once (ideal) or to run multiple copies of it at once (more likely).

Since I’m new to Raspberry Pi and Linux audio, I need to know if are any audio driver or hardware limitations that are going to make this impossible or insanely hard. (I know I’ll need an audio output device per channel.)

My googling makes me think there aren’t, but it’s a weird enough use case that I’m inferring from related discussion.

Thanks

Maybe a way is to run multiple chroot instances and install Mopidy in them. Then you can assign the output to audio hardware or network clients which will play it.
I thought about this because I installed Mopidy with chroot on my Synology DiskStation and play the audio through a node.js AirPlay-Hub to the Apple Airport Express.

I used airtunes_hub for node.js

And configured the output in the mopidy.conf like this:
output = audioconvert ! audio/x-raw-int, channels=2, rate=44100, endianness=1234, width=16, depth=16, signed=true ! tcpclientsink host=localhost port=1234

In my example I start the node.js server on startup of chroot at local port 1234. In the server.js file I specified the IP-adress of my AirPort Express as the default in my server.js, because I didn’t know better.

Hope this will help you. :blush:

Martin