AirPlay is a great feature that allows you to send music from your Apple device to speakers in your home, such as HomePods, Apple TVs, Macs, and even Sonos and Belkin devices that support it directly. But what about Google devices, such as Nest Hub or older Chromecasts? In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to use the Aircast add-on in Home Assistant to tie together all your Google Home smart speakers and use them as an AirPlay speaker.
Before we start, let’s note that this method is very hassle-free and easy to do, but it requires Home Assistant installed on a Raspberry Pi that supports ARM v7 or higher. Raspberry Pi 1 or Pi 0 won’t be able to use this add-on, but Raspberry Pi 2 and onwards, including Pi 0 2, are supported.
To install the add-on, go to the configuration area and click on “Add-ons,” “Backups,” and “Supervisor.” Then, under the “Add-ons” tab, click the button labeled “Add-on Store,” which is in the bottom right-hand corner. Scroll down to the Home Assistant community add-ons area and click on the Aircast add-on, then click “Install.”
Before we start using it, let’s head over to the configuration tab and specify the IP address that the Aircast server needs to bind to. This will be the local IP address of your Home Assistant instance. You can leave this empty as the add-on will detect the interface automatically, but in case you have multiple network interfaces, it might detect it incorrectly.
The next option is for enabling or disabling drift. We can leave this off, but if you are having performance issues between using multiple speakers, turning this on can help. When drift is enabled, it allows adding or dropping a frame when the case source frame production is too fast or too slow.
Next, we can configure the latency options. Tweaking this can allow you to fix any audio stuttering that can happen if you have a low-quality network. It’s recommended that this value is not below 500 milliseconds. I’ve noticed with my setup, a thousand milliseconds works well, but this can differ in your setup.
Finally, we can set the log level. It’s useful to have this on at the start when you’re first getting started so that you can easily diagnose any issues that may arise. Now let’s click “Save” and restart our add-on.
Once it’s restarted, we should notice that on our Apple devices, we can now see our Google smart speakers as AirPlay devices, and this will also include any device groups that you may have created within the Google Home app.
The downside to using Aircast with Google smart speakers is that instead of natively compatible AirPlay 2 devices, to adjust the volume from our phones, we’re going to have to use the Google Home app as opposed to doing it straight from the speakers and TV section of the control center within iOS.
In conclusion, Aircast is an excellent add-on that allows you to tie together all your Google Home smart speakers and use them as an AirPlay speaker. It’s effortless to install and configure, and the only downside is the volume adjustment from phones. We hope you found this tutorial useful. Thank you very much for reading, and see you on the next one.