Integrating Music Services

[WiiM Team]

Hi, we'd like to see what music services you want integrated into our WiiM Home app.

Please note, we hear you on Apple Music and YouTube Music as those are two we would love to integrate, but aside from these two, please post which ones you'd like to see and please vote up the ones you want. We are curious about what our community wants, and we'll see what we can do!

--
2/13/24 - We closed this thread and want to move the conversation to this thread where there is a poll. https://forum.wiimhome.com/threads/integrating-music-services-poll.2816/

Thanks!
WiiM Team

 

[ratty]

Yes they prefer their own but they all support ALAC which it doesn’t send to them for Apple Music. If you’re grouping them for mulitroom to a good amount of speakers and sending it from a phone it will be a lot more than 1Mbps and any latency is a killer for multiroom. I know how crappy a lot of peoples Wi-Fi is in action and dealing with multiple clients and Sonos has all sorts of issues with it if not using its own Sonos net.

I can't speak for AirPlay to multiple devices, but from those comments it sounds like it doesn't use multicast.

I know Sonos very well, and a substantial system with multiple rooms works fine on a decent 5GHz WiFi mesh.

 

[CrystalGipsy]

I can't speak for AirPlay to multiple devices, but from those comments it sounds like it doesn't use multicast.

I know Sonos very well, and a substantial system with multiple rooms works fine on a decent 5GHz WiFi mesh.

I don’t think any protocol for music uses multicast for actual streaming as it would likely flood most users networks. However they do use it for discovery and communication purposes not streaming. Airplay and Chromecast use mDNS, Sonos uses SSDP.

Not all of Sonos hardware support 5Ghz, only the most recent ones have started to. My ones are only 2.4ghz and that includes an ARC. But I’ve seen more issues on support forums with badly setup mesh than most regular Wi-Fi setups.

But none of these help with Airplay as it works differently to all the others as the controller device is sending out the streams not the devices pulling the streams. Asking a phone to manage say 8 speakers is asking a lot of its Wifi and to maintain the the timing needed for accurate sync play. It’s the only reason that makes sense for them to stick with AAC for Airplay 2 where legacy is still ALAC as it doesn’t do mulitroom.

 

[Brantome]

I don’t think any protocol for music uses multicast for actual streaming as it would likely flood most users networks. However they do use it for discovery and communication purposes not streaming. Airplay and Chromecast use mDNS, Sonos uses SSDP.

Not all of Sonos hardware support 5Ghz, only the most recent ones have started to. My ones are only 2.4ghz and that includes an ARC. But I’ve seen more issues on support forums with badly setup mesh than most regular Wi-Fi setups.

But none of these help with Airplay as it works differently to all the others as the controller device is sending out the streams not the devices pulling the streams. Asking a phone to manage say 8 speakers is asking a lot of its Wifi and to maintain the the timing needed for accurate sync play. It’s the only reason that makes sense for them to stick with AAC for Airplay 2 where legacy is still ALAC as it doesn’t do mulitroom.

And there’s the view that multi room is more of a “party mode” so AAC will suffice, and that ALAC would/should be used for “serious” listening on a single main system?

 

[CrystalGipsy]

Be nice if they thought that way but given they give you no way to play bit perfect and above 44.1 from their lossless collection without hardwiring a phone or tablet via a USB dac or DDC to your Hifi I don’t think it’s on their agenda at all. It feels like a throw back to the days of when you had to have a dock and an iPod to stream.

 

[Bismarck]

Native apps for both Amazon Music and Deezer stream in ALAC 16/44.1 over AirPlay2.

Does it mean that the decoding from ALAC happens on the fly on the AirPlay2 device?

 

[CrystalGipsy]

Does it mean that the decoding from ALAC happens on the fly on the AirPlay2 device?

For Apple Music not sure where it happens but most likely it’s on the device . As AM on the device does actually show your playing lossless, it gives no indication of it being AAC nor is it documented anywhere for us to see. It’s device vendors that noticed it first but if you look at the bandwidth the endpoints are pulling it’s considerably less than what it should be. Also streamers that show the stream format such as the Cambridge CXN v2 show it as being AAC. I heard about it from Naims lead software engineer on their forum as they pulled debug code and saw the stream being AAC to their devices via Airplay 2. Funny thing is lots on the forum swore it sounded as good as Qobuz hires as they believed it was hires. How easily the ears are fooled.

 

[ratty]

Not all of Sonos hardware support 5Ghz, only the most recent ones have started to. My ones are only 2.4ghz and that includes an ARC.

It depends on one's definition of "recent". All speakers since Play:3 (a 12 year old design) can connect to 5GHz, except for home theatre speakers like Arc which need to use 2.4GHz as their 5GHz radio is reserved for satellites.
But this is way off-topic, so I'd better stop there.

 

[ratty]

Does it mean that the decoding from ALAC happens on the fly on the AirPlay2 device?

It must be. I simply noted that the bandwidth of the AirPlay2 stream sent to Sonos devices from AM and Deezer was around 1Mbps and fluctuated with music complexity. An AirPlay2 stream from Apple Music was a constant 256kbps (plus overheads).

 

[Biglars]

Bandcamp is a must, being a Plex client would be great too.

casting my votes for bandcamp and plex here as well (and sorting options!).

 

[shinedou]

casting my votes for bandcamp and plex here as well (and sorting options!).

Why are you posting this on the Apple music request thread? Just kidding I agree, bandcamp and Plex

 

[Pcryan5]

What @djdanny said
Nugs - RELISTEN - Deadhead archives in that order.

 

[fademi]

Mixcloud, Idagio, Presto Music.

 

[Stessull]

Plex/Plexamp for me.

 

[butch81385]

Nugs.net and SiriusXM are the two I'm most hopeful for. Would get a lot of use out of both.

 

[viktor]

Support SMB for music sharing

 

[Mr Ee]

Support SMB for music sharing

I agree it'd be nice if that was within the wiim app, but other apps can do that, such as bubbleupnp (android), if you want / need that before it potentially becomes available.

 

[Tacit]

Youtube Music

 

[Achim1811]

My very private opinion is: Why should WiiM their items name as explicit "versatile audiophile" and then waste resources for such garbage sound quality like YTM? Because it's "free"? If one is ok with this performance he would likely be also ok with chromecasting it.
Beside that I do not believe that Google would give a dime for it. They are fine with Sonos and as far as I know no other streamer has it integrated. But I am open for learning

 

[Brantome]

Yeah, I don’t believe there’s a publicly available API for YouTube Music and from what I’ve read, it probably goes against Google’s terms of service to try and reverse engineer it. Probably the same for Apple Music. Wiim probably wouldn’t want or are able to afford litigation with giants like that.

Also, I don’t think it’s feasible for the WiiM Home app to be a universal player that covers every service that’s out there, never mind the existing and emerging (and arguably preferable) Connect mechanisms which allow you to use services’ more feature rich native apps.

 

[StoneFree]

Plex / Plexamp would be great!