Audio Streaming Platforms

The hard part of streaming audio is not any one protocol. It is making six of them coexist on one box. Roon, Tidal Connect, Spotify Connect, Qobuz, AirPlay, and DLNA all assume they own the audio output, and on embedded Linux only one of them can. Get the arbitration wrong and you ship a product that drops audio when the user switches apps.

On our last platform we isolated each streaming service in its own container and arbitrated ALSA device ownership centrally, so a misbehaving service cannot take the others down and updates roll out per-service instead of as one monolithic image. That platform passed Roon Ready certification, a process we now know well enough to plan around instead of being surprised by.

We work the hardware and software together, so the clock architecture, the PCM/DSD path, and the network stack get designed as one system instead of bolted together at the end.