It’s been a long time since I’ve written about my Raspberry Pi Whole Home Audio Project.

Simply, that’s because I’ve hit a bit of a wall and I’m especially busy with work right now so I haven’t been able to find the time to work my way around it.

The problem is that the USB WiFi adapters that I bought (for about $5 each) don’t perform well. They have signal strength issues, and while they do work and maintain a network connection, the poor signal strength means the connection isn’t fast enough to stream audio. There are plenty of other people out there having the same problem. You get what you pay for, I guess, and I need to buy replacement adapters.

I’m also considering a change in direction. My original plan was to install mopidy on one of the Pis and use pulse audio to stream the output to the others.

I’m considering instead installing TuneBlade on one of my Windows PCs. TuneBlade takes all the audio output from that computer and streams it using Apple’s AirPlay protocol. I’d then install ShairPort on all the Pis to turn them into AirPort receivers.

What do you guys think?