Pis consume lower power, but are less powerful also. I think thr Power Consumption VS Performance is way better on Tiny/Mini/Micros. The Pi4 may idle at 3-4W where a 8th gen USSF will idle at 6-8W, but will provide more than 2x the performance IMO.
I prefer paying almost the same price for a USSF with an i5-8500T than a Pi, even if it consume more, idle under 10W is great, and they let you go up to 65W if needed!
Deleted, I figured out you were not conplaining, but responding to another comment
They are Ultra Small Form Factors PCs from the big brands. Lenovo ThinkCenter Tiny, HP EliteDesk/ProDesk Mini and Dell Optiplex Micro. They are small, quiet, they don't pull a lot of power and they are not too expensive when you get second-hand ones that are decomissioned from business environments.
The only thing is that they don't have a lot of room for expansion/storahe. Some some have 1x M.2 port for NVMe + 1x 2.5" slot, some have 2x M.2 ports. Most don't have PCie ports (apart a few Tinys) but if you want affordable nodes, they can be great!
Edit: you can read more here https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/
I decided to go with Tiny/Mini/Micros personally. It consumes more than a Pi but it's also more powerful. I can find second-hand TMMs locally with 8th gen Intel i5 for almost the same price as a Pi kit (Some Single Board Computers looks affordable, but you often need to add storage, a power brick, an enclosure, which can add up quickly!)
I use TMMs with a mix of 6th-gen and 8th-gen Intel i5. The 6th gen are decent for my needs, but the >7th-gen's iGPU supports more codecs, which is useful if you want to stream HEVC. i5-8500T also have 2 more cores than i5-6500T!
Edit: those TMMs are used in a lot of businesses and often replaced every 3-4 years. They may be slightly more power hundry than newer hardware, but I like to think I am saving them from being e-waste!
Personally I do:
Maybe it's overkill, maybe it's not enough, I'll know when something fail and I am screwed, ahah
As a note, everybody should test/check their backup frequently. I once had an issue after changing an IP address and figured out half my backups where not working 6 month later...
I never had to provide the server address kr to relogin in the app personally. That's an annoying bug you had!
That's what I was thinking for the next build. Having all clients running on the same Pi isn't necessarily the best idea, espacially with the Pi4 as the USB controller have a buffer issue I didn't have on my Pi3 when running multiple USB soundcards
I have speakers througout the house wired to my mechanical room and divided in 3 groups so I use a Pi4 with 3 USB sound cards with small amps
I am not sure what speaker setup I'd like when I move though! I might do it differently!
Mopidy (and LogitechMediaServer for that matter) will obviously let you stream local music or use other plugins (like TuneIn or other streaming platforms) but what really didn't work for me with librespot was the way it works when having multiple people using it.
Arriving home to my SO listening to music and needing to connect spotify to librespot, select join (vs take over), then stopping the music was what I didn't like much. I feel like queues are also not the easiest thing to handle on spotify
That being said, I prefered browsing/searching on spotify and I like the fact that we didn't have to use only one of our account to stream (so Daily Mixes on my account were affected by everything that was streamed for example)
I honnestly didn't find a perfect solution yet, so I am open to ideas!
I am not sure how hosting your own instance helps anyone thought. It's fun and it let you own/host your data, but it's not something that help the fediverse unless you have a lot of users which would be too much to the other instances?
If it wasn't the fact that I always had iasues with spotify on LMS/SqueezeBox, I would still use it today. Songs stopping and/or randomly skipping a few times per hour killed my experience
I started using Mopidy with Snapcast. My only issue so far is Iris's spotify search that's a bit of a mess
Edit: I know the fix would be to stop using spotify ahah
I do restore my VMs to deplicate VMs to test from time to time (it's pretty easy with Proxmox) but I use Restic for data backups which encrypts the data before uploading it, so one should restore a backup to a different folder to ensure the data integrity and that you didn't forget your keys ahah
You don't have to do it every week or month, but it's worth doing it a few times a year or when you change something!