After I built out my two speakers running squeezelite on esp controllers, I ran into some issues when streaming music to them. Sometimes they would stutter, skip, or have other audio playback issues. I knew these weren’t problems with my media files, so it had to be my setup for the speakers.
I setup the speakers on a different VLAN from my server running music assistant, and since I use unifi for my networking gear with switches that aren’t layer 3, I know that all cross VLAN traffic has to go through my firewall before it can go to the destination. For my music, that means the stream goes from music assistant to the firewall and then back to the speakers. If the firewall has any spike in latency for those packets, it will become immediately apparent.
I decided to rule this out by adding a second virtual network adapter to my home assistant server and therefore music assistant. This network adapter would be on the IOT VLAN natively and so all traffic would be directly to the destinations on that VLAN.
Attaching to this was simple enough, add an additional NIC in home assistant to connect directly to the VLAN the speakers are on. Shut down and start back up home assistant (it needs a full shutdown to pick up proxmox hardware changes). After that I gave the speakers the new home assistant IP address on their native VLAN.
This kinda just worked, the speakers were streaming far more consistently, significantly fewer drops in connectivity, and far another payback. I would certainly recommend to keep music assistant on the same VLAN as the speakers for it.