Problem: How to provide music streamed from an internet radio station across the grounds of a Chateau?

This was the situation facing Yves, the organiser of Fete de la Science  in 2022.

Initial thoughts:

In February 2022, we were thinking about a Raspberry Pi, connected to the streaming web radio.  Providing audio to a battery powered speaker.  But we needed 4 loudspeakers, each with their own Raspberry Pi board.  The semiconductor shortage made getting 4x Raspberry Pi’s uncertain.

Second idea:

We had a bunch of ESP32 boards.  Could we get audio out of them?  A search led us to the ESPAudio library and the PCM5102A I2S audio DAC (digital to analog convertor).  A couple of weeks later our first boards arrived from Aliexpress and we could try.  I2S turned out to be simple to use with this library, and after playing some local MP3 files, then some network MP3 files from a web server, we moved on to streaming.