I used to use my Raspberry Pi with VLCThing; however it did seem to die every so often requiring me to reboot it to fire VLC back up so I rebuilt the Pi as a DLNA media renderer. Since doing this, I can send audio from Big Talker to the Pi as well as throw audio from my Windows 10 computer or any other device that can throw audio at a DLNA media renderer. For anyone interested in comparing, I documented that process and shared it in this thread: https://community.smartthings.com/t/raspberry-pi-as-musicplayer-speech-device-with-bigtalker/38675