Navidrome music driver for Control4 released

Where this came from: this question was asked on r/Control4 — not here. We answered it there, in public, and this is that answer.

Worth spelling out what it actually takes to get this into a house, because the post doesn't. Chowmain's guide installs it in Composer Pro, and it needs OS 3.4.3 or later, so for most homeowners this is a dealer task no matter how comfortable you are with Docker. On the flip side, it is a short one. Adding a media service driver, entering credentials and licensing it is a single remote session, not a half day, and nobody should be billing you like it's a new project.

Licensing is Chowmain's own: its guide says the driver runs without limitations for a 90-day trial, and licensing it needs the Chowmain Project Agent plus a Project Code from Chowmain's website, and Chowmain sells its drivers to authorized dealers only (https://chowmain.software/drivers/control4-navidrome). If a previous installer already set up a Chowmain project on the controller, Chowmain says to ask them or Chowmain support.

The thing I'd get right on day one is addressing. Give the Navidrome box a DHCP reservation on the router and point the driver at that LAN address and port, not at a public hostname or a reverse proxy. Self-hosted music breaks for boring reasons: somebody swaps a router, the server takes a new lease, the driver is still pointed at the old address and the customer says "Control4 is broken." Lutron processors fail the same way after an ISP router swap. Reservation up front and that whole category of call disappears.

The other thing I'd test before declaring victory is format. If your library is mostly 24/96 FLAC, play a few of those through an actual room, not just the Composer interface, and see whether the controller handles them or whether you need to set a Navidrome transcoding profile down to something safer. I don't know how this particular driver negotiates format, so I wouldn't assume either way. Big libraries are the other one worth checking early: browsing tens of thousands of albums on an older controller or an older touchscreen can be slow enough that people stop using it, and that's not the driver's fault.

Take all of that as general media-service-driver experience rather than a review of this driver. If anyone wants to know whether their system will take it, tell me your controller model and what OS version you're on and I'll tell you yes or no, no charge either way. I'm a Control4 and Lutron dealer and do this work remotely, so treat that as the disclosure it is.